Succumbing to the Truth
by OnlyTheInevitable
Summary: Mulder and Scully are called onto a case where men are being seduced and attacked in their sleep by an unknown force. This force usually disguises itself as the person the victims most desires, so what happens when the case starts to get a little too close for comfort for our agents? MSR Casefic. For the 2019 X-Files Summer Fanfiction Exchange.
1. Something Wicked This Way Comes

**Dedicated to the wonderful red2007 on Twitter for the 2019 Summer X-Files Fanfic Exchange. Huge thank you, as always to by beta and source of sanity Annie, admiralty.**

The Clarke Residence

Bakersfield, California

June 2nd, 1999

10:52pm

_This was the third time this week._

It was the first and foremost pressing thought on his mind right now. The first time it happened it was _Dear God, what's happening? _The second time was _No, not again. _But after three times he felt disturbingly rational, maybe it was just the shock.

At least, that's how Jack Clarke tried to rationalize his situation as his body was pressed firmly onto the bed by a dark black mass. He couldn't see a face this time, but he could feel the energy…and the warmth. He felt hot air press onto his neck as his lower body squirmed, almost as if it was moving of its own accord, or as if it was reacting to something else.

It was the third time, but he still hadn't given up the hope that this was all just a dream. He couldn't think of any other way to explain it, so he let his eyes roll to the back of his head as he succumbed to the world's most realistic wet dream.

When he woke up in the morning, he felt like every cell in his body was running on low and his bedroom smelled like rotting meat. He got up lethargically, stripped himself of his crusted over boxers, and made his way to the bathroom only to be greeted by the same sight as the mornings before. His eyes were completely bloodshot and his skin looked like notebook paper with thin veins of blue sticking out as the lines.

He bent over to splash some water on his face, but winced when he felt an uncomfortable stinging on his back. He turned around and careened his head towards the mirror only to see eight deep gashes marring his shoulder blades.

"Oh my god," he whispered, his eyes widening in horror as he realized this most certainly had not been merely a dream.

J. Edgar Hoover Building

Washington, D.C.

June 4th, 1999

4:30pm

He'd been working hard on something all day,

"Scratch marks," Scully stated, watching Mulder's face to gauge his reaction to her statement.

"Not just any scratch marks, Scully," he tsked, raising an eyebrow in challenge.

She looked back at the projector slide of the man who sent Mulder a -quote- _very urgent e-mail_, and tried to see whatever it was she was missing. "Sex scratch marks," she deadpanned. "Not exactly special."

Mulder raised both his eyebrows, this time in pleasant surprise and poorly tried to suppress a grin. "Oh?"

"Am I wrong?" she asked.

There was something about the introductory part of an investigation that put Mulder in a playful, and easily excitable, mood and wasn't going to let her off that easy. "About the rarity of sex scratch marks or-"

"Mulder..." she warned.

"Because I must say, I'm quite interested, from a purely scientific standpoint, in hearing how often you've encountered sex scratch marks," he teased smoothly.

He'd always liked teasing her, but recently it just seemed like he was hell bent on crossing the imaginary line they'd drawn between partners and more than. He hadn't fully crossed it yet, though New Years had been pretty damn close. She could tell he was nervous, but apparently he'd decided to set up shop right on the line and see how much he could get away with. Sometimes he'd earn a blush in response, on really good days a shy smile, and on days like today: a stern look.

"Fine," he smirked, pressing the next slide to show the same man with bloodshot eyes and a sickly pallor in what appeared to be a self-taken photo. "Supernatural scratch marks."

She felt her brows furrow together at his proclamation. "I'm not following."

Mulder stood up straight from his position leaning against the projector and walked over, reciting the file before even grabbing it. "Jack Clarke, aged 35, says he's been having strange dreams this week and has been waking up feeling absolutely exhausted and worn out-"

"Has he tried going to a doctor? Or even taking vitamins?" Scully interrupted, looking at the image of a man who appeared to have never seen the sun before.

"Jack considered that, but he's adamant nothing in his routine has changed. Then a few days ago, he woke up with these claw marks along his back which he hasn't been able to find a reasonable explanation for."

"Did his girlfriend-"

"Single," Mulder answered before she could even ask the question.

She opened her mouth and he added, "And he says he's in the middle of a rather long dry spell, so no partners in the equation."

_Sounds familiar,_ she thought to herself as she played with her nail idly. "I still don't understand why you seem to have such an interest in this. Is it odd? Yes. But is it completely possible he could have injured himself and not realized it? Also yes."

Mulder nodded as she spoke, clearly having anticipated this reaction as his fingers skimmed the folder for something. "Yes, Scully, but-" he stopped as he found what he was looking for, taking it out of the pale yellow folder and sliding it her way, "Is it possible that his friend could have injured himself the exact same way only a few days before dying?"

"Who is this?" Scully asked, leaning forward and taking in the glossy image of a man quite similar to Clarke except he was clearly dead.

"Mark Jones, 36, Jack Clarke's best friend. He apparently had also been suffering from night terrors followed by exhaustion. He got those same marks on him last Saturday and was dead by Tuesday," he replied.

"Dead from what?" Scully asked, looking for anything telling on the body.

Mulder just shrugged. "No one knows, but it's something Mr. Clarke is desperate to find out before it's too late."

Despite her reservations, she couldn't deny she was a little intrigued. "So when do we leave?"

"Tomorrow morning," he replied, handing her an already-prepared plane ticket in her name. "Get ready for a whirlwind of a case."


	2. Fallen Woman

Clarke Residence

Bakersfield, California

June 5th, 1999

4:32pm

Scully had to resist the urge to gasp at the man that opened the door. How he managed to look even paler than he did in the images sent over, she had no idea, but here he was, leaning against the doorframe while looking like death personified.

Mulder must've thought the same thing, because before even introducing himself he asked, "Mr. Clarke, are you alright?"

The man's red eyes were bulging slightly, though Scully thought that might just be due to his emaciated figure, and he nodded vigorously while gesturing for them to come in. "Are you Agents Mulder and Scully?" he asked in a raspy voice.

"Yes, we are. Are you sure you're all right, sir? You look like you could use medical attention," Scully asked, hesitantly stepping into the home. There was an uncomfortable moment of awkward tension as Mulder followed her into the threshold of the home and they turned to watch the man struggle to even find the energy to close his door. She shot Mulder a glance as Mr. Clarke caught his breath, relying on the door to support some of his weight.

He shook his head and lead them to his living room. "No, no. I've been. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me."

Mulder and Scully exchanged a look behind his back and she prodded doubtfully, "You really went to a doctor?"

Another nod as he all but threw himself onto a chair. He barely seemed to recognize they had followed him until he mumbled, "Don't mind the ceiling, I had to have a handyman come fix the light a few days ago."

They just looked at each other before looking upwards, noticing a new layer of spackle haphazardly drooping around a rusty light fixture. They didn't think much of it before hesitantly sitting on the sofa across from him. Scully was just about to repeat her question when he sighed, "They said all the tests came back normal. They even did a, whaddya call, uh, x-ray-"

"They performed a CAT Scan?" Scully offered. Standing up and kneeling beside him in the chair, grabbing his wrist to take his pulse, noticing how clammy and cold he was to the touch.

He seemed startled by her touching him and stumbled over his words. "Y-yeah. It, um, it was normal."

She grabbed his face and, keeping one hand on his cheek, raised a finger in front of his face. "Follow my finger with your eyes."

He did as he was told and as soon as the finger was down his eyes kept flitting from her face to the ground to her chest to the wall. The attention made her a bit uncomfortable and she wasn't finding anything wrong, so she got up and sat next to Mulder again. "And they didn't find a single thing wrong?"

"Yeah, according to them I'm right as rain," he nodded. "Even though they were looking at me like the both of you are now."

Scully straightened at being called out and moved to apologize, but Mulder beat her to it.

"We're sorry, Mr. Clarke, but… your email didn't quite prepare us for your condition," he offered.

"I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude. I just don't know what's happening to me," he sighed, rubbing his head nervously.

"Why don't you tell us when this started?" Scully prompted gently.

"Well, my friend, the one I told you about," he pointed to Mulder, "he was callin' me last week, talking about how he was having these strange dreams and I didn't think much of it, but then _I _started having weird dreams."

"Weird how?" Mulder asked.

Scully saw the man shoot her a shy glance before his demeanour shifted completely. He seemed uncomfortable and Scully was worried she'd done something, but when she looked at Mulder he looked equally as confused. "I, uh," he stammered.

"Sir, we promise anything you tell us will be absolutely confidential," Scully reassured.

"It just feels...inappropriate in front of a lady," he murmured, squirming slightly in his seat.

"Mr. Clarke, Agent Scully has seen it all, I promise nothing you say will shock her," Mulder stated confidently as Scully nodded in affirmation.

"The dreams feel like I'm being intimate with a woman, and-" he paused, "It feels really real."

It took every fibre of Scully's being to keep her eyebrows from shooting upwards at the fact they did, in fact, travel all the way out here because this man had a vivid sex dream. All of her hesitance, however, was matched in intensity by Mulder's piqued interest. "A woman?"

The man nodded and quickly shrugged, "I mean, it _feels _like a woman, and she _looked_ like a woman."

"Looked?" Scully repeated.

"Well, usually I can only catch a glimpse of her face, or else she's just like...a mist?" he sounded like he could barely even believe it himself.

"Was it a woman you know?" Mulder asked.

"No, no. I've never seen her before the dreams started," he mumbled nervously.

"What does she look like?"

"Evil," he said with so much intensity, Scully felt herself break out in goosebumps, regardless of the fact she didn't believe this was anything more than a sick man's sex dream. Looking around, she could see the man seemed to have a cross on every wall of his house which only added to the strangeness of this situation.

"What's she usually doing in your dream?" Mulder asked, sounding equally as thrown by the man's severity.

"Me," he stated simply. They waited for him to elaborate, but he seemed to think that summed it all up.

"I think Agent Mulder is talking more about the specifics," Scully said slowly.

"Have you ever had a woman have sex with you before?" the man asked irritably, looking at Mulder.

She tried to bite back her smile as she saw Mulder's ears turn red. "Um, yes."

"It was like that," he snapped, clearly uncomfortable with this conversation. "I'd be an idiot to ever take that for granted."

"How do the dreams usually end?" she asked, trying to remain on his good side.

"Have you ever-" he started in the same tone, but immediately stopped when she shot him a nasty look. He appeared contrite as he shrank back into himself. "I uh, I," then he made an explosion gesture in front of his crotch, along with a matching sound before grumbling, "-in my boxers and then I wake up. It just feels so real."

"Are you sure it's not? Could it be possible someone's been breaking into your house at night?" Mulder questioned.

The man seemed to get offended at this and he scoffed, sitting up. "No! No, I-the doors are always locked and the windows. If I woke up and there was a naked lady on top of me and if she was _real_ I wouldn't have a problem-"

"Sir," Scully interrupted, trying to comfort his agitation, but he didn't seem to notice her.

"I just, there's nothing I can do with this thing! It feels like I'm paralyzed, I can't move, I can't do anything, and I feel fantastic until I feel awful," he stammered.

"Mr. Clarke," she stated louder, getting his attention this time. "Just because your body is reacting doesn't mean you're consenting for this to happen. If this is, um, a spirit of sorts as seemingly suggested, then this is a metaphysical violation and you shouldn't feel guilty about your body's physiological response."

The man didn't seem to be eased by her words and he simply shook his head before lowering it into his hands. "You mentioned paralysis, is there anything else strange about these dreams?" Mulder questioned, breaking the tense silence.

"No, not that I can think of," he shrugged.

"Well, if you think of anything else, please give us a call. We'll be in the area," Mulder said while standing up, handing the man his business card. Scully worried the man would collapse in front of him, but didn't say anything more as they left.

While walking to the car, Scully looked over her shoulder to make sure they weren't being watched before proclaiming, "Mulder, really?"

"Scully, you have to admit something's wrong with that man. He looks on the verge of death and, besides, there is no way he could have put those marks on himself based on the photos we saw. He'd have to have dislocated his shoulder to make a pattern like that," Mulder defended, unlocking her door before making his way around the car. He resumed his rant as soon as they were both in, "And did you hear him mention the sleep paralysis? That along with his other symptoms are classic signs of a succubus visitation."

"A succubus?" Scully repeated in disbelief. "As in the sexual demon?"

"In relation to the male version, an incubus. Yes, the very same," he replied, starting the car.

"And what _symptoms_ are you referring to exactly?"

"The paralysis, the exhaustion following a nocturnal emission, bloodshot eyes, his fatigue," Mulder listed confidently, either unable to see her eyeroll or ignoring it.

"It more likely could've just been a traumatic sexual night dream. Especially in communities where sexuality is repressed, indulgence, even if unconsciously, can be heavily associated with guilt. Which is why occurrences of succubi and incubi are more common in Middle Eastern countries and in Catholic communities where sexuality is heavily dictated. People are then more willing to blame the paranormal when their own repressed sexual urges come to the surface. Did you see all the crosses in there, Mulder? He's clearly a religious man," she explained as he made his way back to their motel.

"That's an interesting theory, Scully. But did _you _happen to notice that he asked me plainly if a woman had ever had sex with me? Not to mention the-" Mulder put one hand in front of his crotch and made an explosion sound mimicking the other man's ejaculation reference.

Scully rolled her eyes as he laughed at how ridiculous that was. "Well, that's something to take into consideration itself."

"What, his poor charades potential?" Mulder joked.

"No, he was up front with _you. _He didn't even want to talk about the subject in my presence," she explained.

"What do you make of that?" he asked.

"Well, I don't know," she shrugged, fiddling with the air conditioner. "He asked you if a woman has had sex with you before. Maybe he would have answered differently than you did."

"You think he's a virgin?" Mulder asked, surprise evident in his tone.

"Maybe not a virgin, but his phrasing of the question itself was odd," she mused.

"That's true. He didn't ask if I'd had sex with a woman, but if a woman has had sex with me," Mulder clarified.

She felt her brow furrow as she tried to understand the implications of this. While it felt like there was a dominance difference in the tonality of the questions, ultimately they led to the same thing. "I'm not sure I fully understand the difference," she admitted, trying to sound completely indifferent to the turn of this conversation.

"The difference between a man having sex with a woman and a woman having sex with a man?" he clarified.

"As in the psychological difference between the sexes' different perceived response to intercourse? I know women have different chemical releases post-coitally than men do," she explained.

"While that's true, based on the questions before he said it, I think he's talking about the physicality," Mulder responded, idly looking around for a motel to stay at.

She was glad he was semi-distracted because if he wasn't, she was sure he'd be teasing her a lot more for even asking. "I'm not following."

Maybe he wasn't as distracted as he was trying to get her to believe. He let out an almost inaudible sigh and straightened up in his seat, leaning forward a bit. "Well, uh. Okay, so a man's interested in a woman...?" he started.

She wasn't sure why he phrased it as a question until she realized he was making this an interactive learning experience. _Great. _"Okay," she affirmed.

"He wants to have sex with her so he instigates it. Man having sex with woman is great," Mulder explained. She might have been offended that he was speaking to her like a caveman, but she realized he was trying to make this as impersonal as possible. "Sure she reciprocates, it's all great, but I think the responsibility is on the man's shoulders," Mulder explained.

"So you're saying anytime a man instigates sex he's in charge?" Scully questioned, not quite agreeing or liking that line of thought.

"No, not exactly. I'm just trying to rationalize a possible baseline of comparison for his phrasing," Mulder explained, dipping into profiler mode.

"Okay, keep going."

"Conversely, woman has sex with man as in woman instigates. It's um, to the man it might be considered an ego boost or a reassurance of confidence. I think female instigation might be every man's fantasy," he mumbled the last part.

"Every man's?" she repeated.

"Uh," he chuckled nervously, tension filling the car because of the unspoken admission. "I'm just taking shots in the dark here," he lied, putting on his blinker so he could take the next exit to the motel.

_Mulder likes it when women instigate. _She was trying to keep her mind off playing a visual of her straddling Mulder, _the way he would look up at her in pure reverence, how he'd feel growing hard beneath her._ She obviously wasn't doing a good job because she didn't even realize Mulder was talking until he was in the middle of a sentence. "-so I'm thinking he's never really, or very rarely, had women instigate with him. He's used to being the pursuer and, if I had to guess, I'd say he's not used to success either way."

"So what does this all mean?" she asked.

"Maybe it was his desperation for a woman's affection that made him vulnerable to a succubus' attack," he shrugged.

She pursed her lips, thinking of the implications before admitting, "I don't like the idea of the succubus."

"Why, because they don't exist?" he teased.

"No, I just think it's sexist, much like the concept of the 'fallen woman'," she explained while her eyes caught sight of the tall neon blue sign of the motel, shaped like a buffalo.

"The what?" Mulder asked.

"The fallen woman. It was a Victorian concept that essentially equated women's worth to the status of their chastity. If a woman's 'purity' was in anyway compromised, purity being a problematic concept itself, then she was considered a fallen woman, essentially worthless. Often they were made out to be witches or harbingers of evil because they were women with sexual agency."

He was silently digesting this and she added, "While it occasionally was female promiscuity, it oftentimes wasn't, since men have a historical tendency of taking whatever they want. Men considered women filthy, ignoring the fact it was their own touch that tainted them. We never question why men's hands are so dirty in the first place."

"Would Lillith from the Bible be a fallen woman?" he asked.

"Exactly, it dates that far back and it's still with us presently through the rampant shaming of female sexuality. Look at Monica Lewinsky, she was an intern just trying to do her job. There was an abuse of power dynamics, she was put into a position where she would have to say no to the _President of the United States_, and she's become a social pariah, a joke," Scully sighed, getting riled up in the moment.

She tried to rein herself in and return to the issue at hand. "Look, what I'm saying is I think the whole idea of a succubus is in the same vein. Men get to act out their sexual fantasies, but in the light of day blame it on the 'villainous sexual-woman'."

"But there are incubi as well, and women are the ones usually being visited in those cases," he offered, not negating what she just said, just offering a counter theory.

"When was the first documented case of incubi?" she asked, knowing damn well he'd know.

"Mesopotamia was the first documentation."

"And succubi?"

"The fourteenth century."

"Incubi came first most likely because women were merely having completely normal sex dreams, just like men probably were, but of course there had to be some sort of paranormal influence because surely women _can't _simply be sexual," she stated, sarcastically.

He turned off the car which had been sitting idly in the parking spot, and turned to her. "And you're thinking the succubi came around because of the influence of the incubi legend, but the tactic with them was to reinforce the idea that women who are sexual need to be punished?"

"Yes," she nodded, unbuckling her seatbelt. "It's no different than the thousands of hours of derogatory porn made every year where women are treated as objects. Women's sexuality is treated as a commodity to be consumed by the male viewer, not an actual facet of her as a human being that she should be able to enjoy," she explained.

He unbuckled his own seatbelt and she continued when they were out of the car, "I think men like Jack Clarke whom, as you mentioned, doesn't receive a lot of attention from women, probably relies on pornography as a substitute for love and then didn't know how to accurately process the possibility of a woman, fake or not, coming onto him."

She walked towards him as he opened the trunk and he gently stated, "Not all men who watch porn have an awful view of women. You know that, right?"

She felt a bolt of guilt hit her as she realized she forgot about his own predilection. "I'm sorry, Mulder. I didn't mean-"

He offered her a smile to show there were no hard feelings and reassured, "I know. Just playing devil's advocate and perhaps just wanting to wave a white flag on behalf of a certain group of men, but there are quite a lot of porn movies that aren't derogatory and embrace, and actually focus on, the satisfaction and genuine pleasure of women."

She'd never actually asked him what his taste in porn was, she'd just seen the tapes every now and then out of the corner of her eye and did her best to ignore it to give him some privacy. This new admission that he preferred porn centered on women's pleasure was fitting and made her cheeks blush slightly. She felt bad for essentially backing him into a corner and forcing him to reveal something so personal, so she offered her own admission, "You're right. I've seen many in my time that, as you mention, um, do focus on equal pleasure between the participants."

She mumbled this as she grabbed her suitcase from Mulder and ignored the warmth of his fingers as they brushed on the handle. She was avoiding his gaze, but he wasn't responding, so she looked up only to see a shit-eating grin on his face. "I can't believe my ears, did Dana Scully just admit to watching porn?"

She felt heat spread to the back of her neck, but she wasn't going to back down. "What? Does that surprise you?"

He grabbed his own bag and shut the trunk. "I don't know, I think I assumed your catholic guilt would have gnawed at you or something," he chuckled.

She motioned for them to walk to the front office while she chastised him, "As I just mentioned, I think it's archaic and wrong to think women shouldn't enjoy sex. As a scientist, I recognize it's human nature, and as a woman I see the more...carnal instinct." She licked her lips in response to the interested sound of affirmation he made in the back of his throat in response to the last part of her statement. "The church may still try to follow the ideology that purity is somehow connected to moral decency, but I think it's repressive."

Mulder smiled at her as he opened the door for her, "Scully, you never cease to amaze me." A shy smile in response graced her lips and she stepped inside. Their conversation paused for the time being as they booked connecting rooms and settled in.

She was in the middle of hanging up her suits when there was a rap on her door. "Come in," she called out. Making sure the connecting door was unlocked during a case was always the first thing she did, being that Mulder was usually walking through it within thirty seconds of getting their rooms.

Like clockwork, the door opened and Mulder leaned against the frame donning a heather gray t-shirt and some shorts. A look she was quite fond of. "Going running?" she asked, trying to keep her appreciation to herself.

"Yeah, I was just thinking about our conversation earlier," he started.

She was nervous he was going to rekindle the porn conversation, but she let out an exhale of relief as he asked, "We still have no explanation of what's affecting him physically."

She returned to her bed and sat down to take off her shoes. "Well, I want to see a tox screen on both him and his dead friend. We also need to talk to the police department tomorrow and ask them about the investigation they'd done into his place. We still haven't ruled out the possibility that it really was a home invasion of some sort," she responded, letting her shoes fall to the floor as she stretched for what felt like the first time today.

She caught Mulder's eyes flicker downwards on her body before snapping back up. "I'm still not ruling out the possibility of a paranormal presence of some sort, but I set up a meeting with the police department tomorrow morning," he told her, clearing his throat.

"Sounds good. I might call it early tonight, so I might be asleep by the time you come back," she yawned, rubbing her face as she realized how exhausted this day of traveling really was.

"I'll leave you be. See you in the morning," he nodded, closing the door.

"Night," she called out.


	3. Inconsistencies

EZ8 Motel Bakersfield

Bakersfield, California

June 6th, 1999

6:58am

He was trying desperately to convince his body to go back to sleep so he could get the mere extra thirty minutes that potentially lay ahead of him if he could just settle down again. The sun had barely started to kiss the blinds, the soft lines on the wall above him the gentle impression of a day soon to come. Some may have wanted to enjoy the serene beauty of the moment, but Mulder would rather enjoy the beautiful sight of his eyelids as he got the rest he desperately wanted.

He could hear Scully in the other room getting ready, the soft murmur of her voice as she talked to someone on the phone, the words indistinguishable but the sounds comforting all the same.

When he'd woken up, he'd been sporting surprisingly turgid morning wood, which was probably the reason he was having a hard time getting back to sleep. No pun intended.

This usually happened when they were on cases, and he personally blamed it on the spike of time he got to spend in close proximity to Scully. And that was just on a normal basis when their interactions didn't wander into Scully revealing her sexually liberated opinions. It was a topic they avoided like the plague, oftentimes ending up choking on their words and making the air around them tense and charged.

_Speaking of. _Figuring he wasn't going back to bed anytime soon, he rolled onto his back and kicked the sheet down with his feet, reaching into the fly of his boxers so he could pull his erection out. _Might as well take care of things in this spare time._

On the initial downward stroke, he thought of Scully's revealed sentiments, "_As a woman...I understand the carnal instinct of it all." _She'd been so open with him yesterday, probably due to the comfort of it simply all relating to the case. Hearing her impassioned speeches always stirred something in him, and hearing impassioned speeches about her passion...that was a whole new level. He'd had to sit upright in the car like an awkward kid because the last thing he'd wanted to do was have her notice he'd popped a boner while hearing her talk about the objectification of women. That really would have proven her point.

He let out a shuddered breath as his cock started to stiffen further under his hand's attention and his mind's remembrances. He loved when she turned red when she got flustered. He had to keep himself from staring at her too much in the car yesterday in fear of exacerbating his predicament, but even the few glances he snuck left an impression. _God, she's so beautiful._

Part of him felt guilty for getting aroused from what'd she'd revealed yesterday, but the last thing he ever wanted to do was objectify her. Did he desire her? Yes, but her personality and brains had just as much, if not more, influence on why she affected him so intently. He was in love with her, plainly and simply.

He loved everything about her. Her theories, the way her perfume lingered in a room, the way she smirked at him when he'd mustered the courage to hit on her, the way she bit her bottom lip, the way she said his name...

"_Mulder..."_

He stifled a groan as he quickened his pace, his hips unconsciously squirming in an attempt to speed up his ascent to his inevitable climax. His vivid memory was useful on cases, but it was heaven sent when trying to fantasize about your partner.

"_Mulder,_" he heard in a louder volume than before, followed by a rap of knuckles on the wood of the adjoining door.

His eyes snapped open as he realized she'd been trying to get his attention. Shoving himself back into his boxers and frantically pulling the sheet up, he turned onto his side and curled into the fetal position to hide his screaming erection. "Ye-ah?" he called, hoping she took the crack in his voice and the overall hoarseness as him just having woken up.

"Can I come in?" she asked.

He quickly did a check to make sure he was covered completely before repeating, "Yeah!"

The door opened tentatively, and he was met with the sight of a freshly-showered Dana Scully, the smell of her body wash wafting into the room through the open door. "Hey, I just-are you okay?" she asked.

He lifted the hand that he wasn't just masturbating with and wiped his face to feign sleepiness, touching hot perspiration as he realized he probably looked like a mess. "Yeah, just woke up," he lied.

"I thought I-nevermind," she sighed, waving her hand to dismiss the questions she didn't have time for, much to his relief. "I just got off the phone with the police, another man in town called in and described a situation similar to what Jack Clarke and Mark Jones had initially reported."

"Similar?" he repeated, easing his weight onto his elbow while keeping his legs locked and bent.

"The only difference was his wife was lying in bed next to him," she informed, leaning against the wood of the door. "I told the police we'd meet them at their place ASAP."

He nodded and eased himself up into a sitting position, knowing Scully would avert her eyes anyway to give him privacy since he was shirtless. "Okay, I'll be out in a minute."

"Meet you at the car," she replied, turning around and shutting the door behind her.

He lifted the sheet and looked at his neglected boner, softening from abandonment. "Sorry buddy, not today. Pack it up," he whispered before sliding off the bed and getting ready.

Mayhew Residence

Bakersfield, California

June 6th, 1999

7:40am

"You the specialists?" a cop asked from behind the crime scene tape bordering the normal-looking home.

"You could say that," Mulder replied, pulling out his badge so they could both flash the officer. "I'm Special Agent Fox Mulder and this is my partner, Special Agent Dana Scully," he said as they bent under the tape to walk up to the house.

"I think we spoke on the phone," the man said to Scully, extending his hand to her. "Officer Smithson," he introduced himself.

"Yes, we did. Thank you for calling us in," Scully replied, shaking his hand. "Can you tell us more about what you know?"

"Kate Mayhew called this morning and said her husband Thomas had been attacked. When we asked 'by what' she couldn't give an answer," he explained.

"When you arrived on the scene what did you think attacked him?" Mulder asked.

"Rough sex," the man snorted, a few other fellow officers nearby joining in.

He looked over at Scully who looked equally as surprised. "Excuse me?"

The officer looked contrite and the smile disappeared, "Sorry, ma'am. It just looks like the wife was trying to have a good time and he wasn't man enough to handle it."

"Why do you say that?" Mulder asked.

"He has scratches all down his back, he looked like he popped some vessels in his eyes straining himself, and he seems all embarrassed and shy," Officer Smithson shrugged.

"Maybe he's embarrassed because his assault is being treated as a joke," Scully deadpanned next to him.

The man let out a half-committed laugh before dismissing her, "There was no assault here."

"But-" Mulder started about to bring up the clear physical evidence.

"Listen," he interrupted. "I just called you guys in because a few things matched the cases you guys came for and because they're both a little spooked. But, in my professional opinion, the man's just upset the wife was a little too rough with him."

Mulder was getting irritated at the man's callous attitude, and he could tell Scully was too by her tone. "Where are the Mayhews now?"

"Ah," he furrowed his brow, as if just considering that information as important. "Mr. Mayhew is on the back of the ambulance getting his cuts looked at and Mrs. Mayhew is inside crying."

"Is it all right if we speak to them?" he asked.

The man shrugged and pulled out a toothpick, "Be my guests."

Scully turned to face him as the officer joined his friends. "Well I don't think they're going to be much help."

"You can say that again," he sighed. "Do you want to go talk to Mrs. Mayhew while I take the Mr.?" he asked. She nodded and they parted ways.

It was easy to find Mr. Mayhew, as his sickly white skin stood out vividly against the dark inside of the ambulance. Mulder flashed his badge to the paramedic attending to the scratches as he stepped into the vehicle. "Thomas Mayhew?" he asked for confirmation.

"Mmm," a weak sound of acknowledgement came from the man.

Mulder sat down on a stool next to the man's head, taking note of the eight deep cuts marring his back and wincing in sympathy. Turning his attention back to the older man, he introduced himself. "My name's Fox Mulder, I'm here to try and figure out what happened to you."

It was slight, but he could tell Mr. Mayhew was trying to shake his head. "It was nothin', Kate shouldn't have called."

"I disagree, Mr. Mayhew-"

"Thomas," he corrected.

"Thomas," Mulder agreed. "You've been badly injured and I can tell you aren't feeling well."

"I've been feeling this way for a few days, it's probably just the flu," he replied.

"And the scratches?" Mulder asked, gesturing to the man's now gauze-covered back.

"I dunno, an accident probably," he shrugged, trying to mask his pain as he sat up so the paramedic could finish up.

"Could you tell me what happened to you while you were sleeping?"

Thomas stared at the ground intently for a moment, the intensity exaggerated by the redness of his eyes. His mouth opened like he was trying to find the words, but he startled at the brush of the paramedics hand against his bare arm. "Sorry," the paramedic apologized.

The man just grunted and then shook his head at Mulder. "How would I know, I was asleep," he barked.

"Did you have an odd dream by any chance? Something unusual?" Mulder prompted, seeing in the man's eyes that he knew exactly what had happened to him.

Mulder looked behind him and saw the paramedic had finished bandaging him and was filling out a form on a clipboard. Turning his attention to the young man he asked, "I'm sorry, could Mr. Mayhew and I have some privacy?"

"Sure," the kid shrugged, hopping off the ambulance and walking towards the front.

Mulder turned his attention back to Mr. Mayhew and spoke with utter sincerity, "Thomas, I'm here to help you. I know what happened may seem hard to explain, maybe even hard to fully understand, but I promise you my full belief without judgement."

He caught Thomas' attention wander over and Mulder followed it to see he was staring at the cops. "I'm sorry if they were rude to you, but I promise I don't work with them and what you tell me will remain confidential between my partner and I. We work on cases that are out of the ordinary."

"It wasn't a dream," he stated.

Mulder was surprised at this and sat up. "It wasn't?"

Thomas shook his head and looked back at Mulder. "Something's wrong with Kate."

"What do you mean?" Mulder asked, realizing Thomas' hesitance may not have been due to embarassment, rather a desire to protect his wife.

"I-I'm not sure, she just," he sighed. "I woke up and she was kissing me, touching me," he continued with a gesture implying more happened that didn't need to be said.

"Was that uncharacteristic?"

"Well, we aren't as young as we used to be. Bones creak, muscles ache, I think we both realized that part of our lives wasn't as easy as it used to be," he explained. "So when she started, I guess it was my eagerness to be intimate again and the dry spell that just made me feel like I was ready to go."

"You felt more lively than normal?" Mulder asked, trying to choose his words carefully.

"I felt ready to go if you know what I mean, but it's not like I even really needed to, she was doing everything."

"Is that usual for her?" Mulder asked.

Thomas shook his head immediately. "No, no. She's always been a bit more reserved, and-" he died off.

"And?" Mulder repeated.

"And last year she broke her hip. This morning, the things she was doing, definitely seem like she'd never had a hip pain in her life. I thought it was weird, but I wasn't about to say anything."

"Did she say anything during this?"

The man rubbed a frustrated hand through his snow-white hair and plainly stated, "When I came, she uh, growled something."

"Growled?" Mulder asked.

"Uh, yeah, it didn't even sound like her. That's when she scratched my back too. She scratched me hard and growled something I'd never heard before."

"What did she say?" He pulled out a pad of paper so he could write what the man said.

"Aradatli-lily," the man sighed, struggling to pronounce it.

Mulder paused, recognizing something familiar about the word. "Ardat Lili?" he repeated.

"I dunno, that sounds right," Thomas said. Mulder nodded in response and wrote it down. "What does it mean?"

"It might be nothing," Mulder shrugged, putting the pad back in his pocket. "What happened after she scratched you?"

"I screamed and pushed her because it hurt. I must've blacked out for a moment of something."

"Why do you say that?"

"It felt like I blinked and one moment she was on me, the next moment she was next to me, clothed and crying." Mulder's brows furrowed and he nodded. "I asked why she scratched me, but she says she didn't. I didn't know she'd called the cops until they just showed up."

"And that's all you remember?" Mulder asked, trying to understand what he'd just been told.

"Yeah, that's everything," he muttered, throwing on his shirt and ignoring Mulder's attempts to help. "Ever heard anything like that before?"

"Well my partner and I are here investigating a pair of unusual cases that are similar, but we're still trying to figure out what's happening. It's complicated to say the least," Mulder said, standing up beside the man and offering a hand to help him from off the ambulance, in the distance he could see Scully talking with a few of the officers and occasionally glancing his way.

"Mr. Mulder," Thomas stated.

Mulder turned to him and saw he was extending his hand which Mulder shook immediately. "Thank you for listening."

"Of course, here's my card if you think of anything else. Feel free to call me anytime," Mulder replied, starting to walk away.

"Mr. Mulder," Thomas called out once more. Mulder turned around and saw the man's face looked more worried than it had before. "Uh, just between us and your partner right?" he asked, glancing over Mulder's shoulders at the cops.

"You have my word," Mulder nodded.

As he made his way over, he saw Scully was deep in the middle of a conversation with a man he hadn't seen before. He was about to find something else to do when Scully waved him over. "Mulder, come here."

He stood next to her as she introduced him. "This is my partner, Agent Mulder. Mulder, this is Dr. Yorke. He's the county's medical examiner."

"Nice to meet you," Mulder nodded, offering a small smile.

"He was just telling me about Mark Jones' autopsy. Everything came back normal despite his look of emaciation and the scratches on his back, but there was something odd that happened during the autopsy."

Mulder looked to the man and he nodded his head enthusiastically. "I'd never seen such a thing before. The body had an unstimulated post-mortem climax," he proclaimed loudly as if it was the most profound sentence he'd ever said.

Mulder registered the words and his eyebrows shot up immediately. "The body…"

"Had an orgasm," the doctor finished.

Mulder looked down at Scully in hopes she would explain a bit more. "It's not unheard of for the deceased to achieve orgasm, in fact it's perfectly common for bodies to get what's called a 'death erection', but for an actual ejaculation there usually has to be electric stimulation of the sacral nerve."

Mulder raised an eyebrow at the doctor and he quickly raised his hands in a proclamation of innocence, "Oh, no, I didn't do anything. It happened before the autopsy even began. I smelled an overwhelming odor and went to get a fan, when I returned I noticed what had happened. I was only gone maybe two minutes at most, but by the time I returned the tumescence was gone, but there was semen on his abdomen."

"What do you make of that?" Mulder asked, the question aimed at both of them.

"I have no idea," the doctor said while Scully shrugged her shoulders. "But that, combined with not being able to find a confirmed cause of death just struck me as odd and I wanted to stop by and let you both know."

"Thank you, Dr. Yorke," Scully said, shaking his hand. "We'll most likely be in contact later."

"Hey, um," Mulder interrupted. "May I ask what the smell was? I presume you're used to foul odors in your line of work."

The doctors face scrunched up at the memory of the odor. "Oh, it was an overwhelming smell of rotting meat. I don't know where it was coming from, but by the time I came back, it was gone.

He nodded, "Thank you for your time."

He turned and Scully motioned for them to walk to the car. "So, how did it go with Mr. Mayhew?" she asked.

"I think the wife was possessed by something," Mulder answered, knowing her reaction before she even said it.

"What?" she balked, disbelief heavy in her tone.

"The husband said while they were having sex, when he came, she scratched his back and growled 'Ardat Lili', which just so happens to be the name of one of the most infamous succubi of all time, something he most definitely wasn't aware of. She's known for trying to extract the seed of men as an offering to her as worship and to populate her race. To top it all off, myths claim you know she's around because of the smell of rotting meat."

Scully stopped short of reaching the car, turning to him with her brows furrowed as she crossed her arms. "Mulder, they didn't have sex."

"He said Mrs. Mayhew was a bit more reserved. Maybe-"

"Mulder, Mrs. Mayhew told me when she woke up she saw her husband laying rigid on the bed with his eyes rolling to the back of his head. She thought he was having a stroke so she called 9-1-1," Scully told him slowly.

Mulder stared at her in shock, then glanced back to the house where he could see Thomas embrace a still weeping Kate. "But-"

"She said one second he was on the bed frozen and the next he was sitting straight up screaming that she'd scratched him," Scully stated.

"He told me they'd been having sex and she attacked him," he replied.

Scully shook her head and glanced over at the couple. "I examined her, Mulder. There wasn't blood anywhere on her, only the bed. She also had a hard time standing up, there's no way she's physically capable of being intimate in her condition."

"How did he get the scratches?" Mulder muttered.

"I think that's the biggest mystery right now," she sighed. "I was talking to the cops who investigated both crime scenes and they said there was absolutely no possible way the houses could have been broken into and that there were no signs of any foul play."

"Something's not adding up," he mused. "I think Jack Clarke might know more than he's letting on."

"Like what?" Scully asked, not following.

"I'm not sure, but I think we should go ask him."


	4. Guess Who

Clarke Residence

Bakersfield, California

June 6th, 1999

11:11am

They were just about to give up after five minutes of knocking on his door and calling out his name when they heard a series of locks coming undone. The door opened to reveal Jack Clarke looking surprisingly more haggard than the last visit. "Mr. Clarke, are you alright?" Mulder asked in shock.

"I-I don't know. What do you want?" he asked, squinting his eyes against the light.

"Would you mind if we came in and asked you a few more questions?" she asked gently.

"About what?"

"Mr. Clarke, we aren't sure you've been totally honest with us," Mulder replied. Scully's eyes widened in surprise at his tone and looked over at him to see he serious.

Clarke snarled at him and sneered, "I've told you all I know."

He went to slam the door, but Mulder stuck his foot in the door and stopped it from closing. "Does 'Ardat Lili' mean anything to you?" he called out.

There was a moment of silence before the door slowly creaked all the way open, the man standing still and looking at Mulder in defeat. "Come in."

They took the same seats they had last time, and Scully noticed he'd added several mirrors along the walls in, what looked like, every location he could fit one. She was just about to ask why they were there when Mulder's voice pulled her focus. "Why don't you tell us the truth Mr. Clarke."

"And why didn't you in the first place? Whatever attacked you is hurting more people," she added, not certain what Mulder knew, but going along with it anyway.

He sighed and his voice wavered as he lamented, "She already killed my friend."

"And we don't want there to be anymore victims," Mulder comforted. "We want to help you, but you need to be honest with us."

"It's embarrassing," the man sighed, having a hard time sitting up, wincing from the exertion.

"We are here to keep you safe, not to judge you," she promised.

He looked at her a moment before letting out a long sigh. "My friend Mark said he'd heard about this, uh, technique to get laid."

Scully kept her face neutral so he wouldn't be offended by any reactions. "What method?"

"He said if we used this," he replied, pulling something from under the couch. "That we could get laid without the dedication of dealing with a real, live woman. No offense," he added, looking at Scully.

"None taken," she deadpanned as she watched him unfold what looked like a game board.

"You used an Ouija Board to summon a demon to have sex with you," Mulder stated, not even needing to ask, somehow maintaining the ability to say that sentence with empathy.

"We didn't know it would be a demon!" he defended.

"You were hoping for a ghost?" Scully asked. It was an honest inquiry, but the fact she asked still seemed to embarrass him.

"I don't know what we wanted," he whined.

"So you used the board, and then what happened?" Mulder asked.

"We used it, I thought Mark was just fucking with me, but then it kept repeating the same words over and over again and it didn't make any sense. It was something weird that I didn't think Mark could've just made up. We let go because we were freaked out and the planchette kept moving on its own."

"Planchette?" she asked, unsure of what that meant.

"The mediator between the words and the spirits, it's what they move to communicate," Mulder explained.

"Yeah, I think it's beneath your seat, the electrician came and he was bumping into it, complaining it was devil magic and shit, so I moved it," he replied, pointing to Mulder's feet after setting the board on the table.

Mulder hunched over and looked under his feet, grabbing around until he re-emerged with the piece of metal. Moving to set it on the table he asked, "So what d-_ahshit," _he stopped suddenly, gasping as he dropped the planchette on the board like it'd burned him.

"Mulder," she asked in concern as he grabbed his hand.

"Sorry, I just-I think my hand spasmed," he murmured, looking at his hand. She reached out and grabbed it, pulling it onto her lap so she could make sure nothing appeared to be wrong.

Mulder didn't argue and continued his question. "What did the spirit say?"

"I didn't know how to pronounce it until you said it at the door," she heard the man answer. The tips of Mulder's fingers were pink and warm to the touch, but they weren't swollen. She wasn't sure what just happened, but since it wasn't dire, she let go of his hand.

It remained on her lap for a moment until he realized she'd stopped and he mumbled an apology and pulled it back onto his own. "Ardat Lili," he continued.

"Yeah, how did you know?" Clarke asked.

"The victim from this morning, he claimed his wife growled it during intercourse, but in all actuality he'd been attacked during his sleep," Mulder explained.

"Like Freddy Kruger," the guy nodded.

"Um, not exactly," Mulder replied.

"Who was the guy that was attacked?" He asked.

"I can't tell you, I promised to keep his identity confidential."

"What else haven't you told us?" Scully asked, changing the subject.

"It wasn't a black mist," he admitted, taking a moment afterwards to cough violently.

"Do you need some water?" She asked when the attack subsided.

He shook his head before rapsing, "No."

"It wasn't a black mist that was attacking you?" Mulder followed up.

"No, to be honest, uh, it looked like my high school english teacher," he chuckled.

"Did you have a relationship with her?" Scully asked.

The man shook his head as if amused by the question. "God no, I haven't seen her in a decade."

"Why do you think the spirit manifested itself to look that way?" Mulder questioned.

He laughed again and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "I mean, I still think about her. What can I say? I think that Van Halen song might as well be my life motto."

"_Hot for Teacher,_" Scully answered in response to Mulder's confused glance before turning his attention back to Clarke. "So you think this _thing _chose to look like your teacher because if you have the highest chance of seducing you?"

"Yeah, definitely. It did it to Mark too," he nodded.

"Did what?" she heard Mulder ask from beside her as Clarke tried to avoid getting too emotional over his deceased friend.

"After the seceance, the same day I was first visited by my 'teacher', Jack said he had sex with Madonna."

"Madonna?" she repeated in disbelief.

He shrugged with a laugh, "He never got over the _Justify My Love _video."

"Jack," Mulder said gently, "Why do you think Jack died?"

The man closed his eyes and wiped a hand across his face. "I don't know. I'm telling you the truth. He called me the day before he was found and said he didn't want to be visited anymore-that he felt like it was draining the life out of him."

"Is that how you feel?" Mulder prompted.

"Look at me!" Jack yelled. "I look like I'm already dead, and none of the advice he gave is working."

"What advice?" Scully asked.

"Apparently if it sees itself in a mirror, it gets trapped in the mirror and you have to smash it. Another legend says you have to stab it with a holy item or a silver item," Jack recited from memory. That answered her questions about the crosses and mirrors, they were weapons not decorations.

"I've heard that too," Mulder nodded. _Of course he had. _"That's a well regarded method for getting rid of unwanted demons, including succubi."

"I'm just scared to go to bed at night. I don't know what to do," he sighed.

"We're going to do everything we can think of to help," Mulder reassured. "You have my phone number, please call if you think of anything else." Scully stood up as he did and they motioned that they could see themselves out, so that Clarke didn't have to strain himself any more than necessary.

EZ8 Motel Bakersfield

Bakersfield, California

June 6th, 1999

10:12pm

"How did you know Jack was hiding something?" Scully asked as he walked into her room with his pyjamas on, which consisted of his boxers and a plain grey t-shirt. The t-shirt she knew was only on in an attempt to be descent in front of her, it would come off before going to bed as she knew from the countless times she'd had to wake him up.

He threw a stack of files on the pillow she wasn't using as he crawled onto the unoccupied side of the bed and snagged a piece of pizza from the box in front of her. They split up shortly after the interview so she could look into the medical records of the victims and he could do some research of his own.

He picked her up an hour later and they grabbed something for a late dinner so they could go over what they learned and relax. "That man said his wife mentioned 'Ardat Lili', I know from past research that she needs to be summoned."

"And you figured she would have attacked the person who summoned her so it either had to be Jack or Mark," she finished, finally understanding his train of thought from earlier.

"Exactly," he mumbled from behind a mouthful of food, pointing the pizza at her for emphasis. He swallowed before continuing, "What did you find out."

She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear before grabbing a slice of her side and sighing. "To be honest, next to nothing. All medical records turn up clean aside from one case of diabetes and another case of glaucoma, but neither of those account for the scratches or anything else," she explained before taking a bite of her pizza, groaning slightly at the taste.

"No medically recorded instances of orgasms with the side effects of slashes on the back, temporary paralysis, or bloodshot eyes," he teased, his eyes watching her throat as she swallowed.

"Not even close," she answered. "What did you find?"

"Nothing we didn't already know. The symptoms we're seeing are reminiscent of sexual demon folklore, same as the circumstances surrounding them and the methods of expulsion Clarke mentioned," as he was talking, she couldn't help but focus on a large drop of pizza sauce that had gathered at the corner of his mouth. "What?" he asked, the red glob moving upwards as he smiled.

Her eyes flickered upwards at being caught and she noticed a gleam in his eyes. Deciding to be bold, she leaned forward, cupping his cheek in her hand and swiped her thumb across the corner of his mouth - gathering the sauce on the pad of her thumb while enjoying the sensation of his lip beneath her.

His eyes widened almost imperceptibly as he focused on her face, curious as to what she was doing. She pretended it was no big deal and leaned back onto her rear, telling him casually, "You had some sauce on your face," bringing the digit to her lips so she could start sucking the sauce off the tip. She only had the confidence to look him in the face for a second before letting her eyes fall to the folder in her lap, bringing her thumb out of her mouth and grabbing another piece.

But in that single second she saw a look of pure arousal pass over his face.

"Thief," he joked in a husky, low baritone that she felt in her gut.

Pretending she didn't hear that, she asked, "Is it common in your stories that the victims are visited by the woman of their fantasies?"

"It's hard because in some cases when someone mentions they 'had sex' with this or that celebrity, they are deemed insane, but it could have been a succubi fufilling their fantasy. Whereas when people mention an average woman visiting them in traditional succubi stories, it doesn't seem as fantastical so maybe it wasn't the person of their dreams. The variability makes it muddy to determine."

She nodded and hummed in response, sliding the pizza box towards him to offer the rest of her slices to him as she stretched on the bed, the silk of her pyjamas sliding comfortably against the cotton of the sheet. She saw Mulder glance appreciatively at the bare skin of her legs being revealed to him, as her shorts ended on her very-upper thigh, and she pretended not to notice, choosing instead to nuzzle into the bed.

"So," he started, breaking the silence that had settled in the room. "If it were an incubus, what form would he take to seduce you?" he asked while wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.

She felt her body tense up at the question as her answer popped into her head immediately. _Mulder. _Without a doubt in her mind, if an incubus came to seduce her, it would look like Mulder. What scared her most is if the spirit was intelligent, there was even a strong possibility it could work. The thought made her shudder before realizing he actually wanted an answer. "What makes you think a succubus wouldn't visit me?"she mused, bending her legs so the flats of her feet where on the bed as her hands came to rest idly on her stomach. If he could deflect with humor, so could she.

"Succubi are the female demons, incubi are the male. They've been known to attack based on what they think the subject would want," he reiterated, discarding an unwanted crust onto the cardboard box.

"I know," she deadpanned, biting back a smile as a look of shock crossed his face.

"Oh, I-I didn't-," he stammered, his brain clearly overwhelmed with the thought to be able to get out a coherent sentence.

"I'm teasing you, Mulder," she reassured. She sent him a questioning look as he exhaled in what sounded like relief.

He noticed how it sounded and immediately sat up straighter, "I didn't mean- I would absolutely support you if you were-I just-" he rambled. Heat rose to the back of her neck as he desperately tried to clear up the fact the sigh wasn't out of relief she wasn't gay, rather, it was out of relief he still had a chance.

"I don't know what I would see," she shrugged, putting him out of his misery while simultaneously avoiding the question. She let her head roll back onto the pillow as she let her eyes shut while playing idly with her nail beds.

"You don't know who you find attractive?" he asked, jumping right back on the interrogation train. "No Timothy Hutton?" he teased, recalling her admittance to him that she found the actor 'dreamy' in _Taps._

She laughed, the motion making the bed shake a little. "Maybe if I was still a teenager."

"Skinner?" he asked, trying to keep himself from laughing at the thought.

She took a theatre class when she was in high school, so she mustered all the dedication to acting she could muster as she bit her lip and turned to him seriously. "You know what," she caught his curious eye and looked away coyly before adding, "I think I know."

"You do?" she could hear he wanted to know, but now, under the assumption she was actually going to say it, she could tell he was nervous.

She almost felt bad enough to take pity on him. She let out an uncharacteristic giggle before looking at the ceiling dreamily, as if imagining this beautiful man. "Yeah, I think I've had a thing for him since I met him."

"Really?" he asked, sitting up a little straighter so that he was a few inches away from leaning over her. He wasn't extremely close, but she could feel his eyes intently on her.

Biting her lip in an attempt to appear shy, but also hold back her smile, she turned to him with her sincerest doe eyes and nodded.

"Do I know him?" he asked.

"Yeah," she admitted. She let out another shy giggle before looking at her hands in faux-nervousness. "You actually introduced me to him."

"I did?" he asked, his voice almost breaking a little. Her heart melted for him in sympathy, but she wanted to tease him just a bit more.

"Mhm," she nodded, tucking her hair behind her ear again.

"Who?" he murmured so quietly it was almost a whisper.

She rolled onto her side, leaning herself up onto her elbow so she was staring straight at him with less than a foot between them. She could tell he was hanging off every word she said, so she chose them carefully. Lowering her voice so it was a bit more breathy than normal, while trying to sound as honest as possible, she admitted. "I am _absolutely _in love with Melvin Frohike."

His eyes shut as a wide smile broke out on his face, nervous laughter of relief escaping him. "You are such a liar."

She was smiling too now, and laughter was threatening to break her voice as she said, "No, I'm not. When women say size doesn't matter, they're talking about the whole man, and I love my compact little Melvin."

He threw his head back in laughter and she couldn't help but join in. "I'll make sure to tell Frohike of your undying affections for him when I see him," he chuckled.

She laid back on the bed and tried to control her genuine giggles as she sarcastically pled, "Oh please do, and can you make sure to tell him about my ultimate fantasy of the other two joining us for a night of bliss?"

He laughed but made a face like he'd smelled sour milk, "Oh god, that is one mental image I _never _wanted to have."

"Why? Because nothing else will ever compare to how sexy it is?" she asked.

"Only twenty five percent of that fantasy is sexy, Scully," he admitted, humor still in his tone but honesty heavy on his tongue.

Their laughter died down softly and she was tasked with the decision they always seemed to come to of 'address the sexually-charged elephant in the room' or 'pretend like it didn't happen'.

She was a creature of habit, but tonight she felt bold so she just moved the tension in a different direction.

"If you think it's so easy, who would visit you?" she asked confidently looking at him even though saying the question out loud made her heartbeat pound in her ears.

He looked taken off guard by her question and his mouth gaped open as he tried to form something to say. "See, not so easy, is it?" she responded definitely, hoping to end the line of inquiry before someone got their feelings hurt or someone revealed too much, since those were truly the only options. She could feel him reaching the same impasse she just navigated, trying to decide to push it farther or let it go.

She made the decision for him.

"It's freezing," she complained with a shuddered breath, shifting so she was on all fours so she could crawl under the covers.

"Do you want me to turn down the air conditioner?" he asked, sliding off the bed and taking the empty pizza box with him to throw it away. She knew that would work. If she expressed discomfort, it was his nature to immediately try and fix it.

"No, but thank you. I think the blankets are enough and I'll probably be out like a light soon," she yawned.

Mulder walked around the perimeter of the room and turned off the lights for her as she adjusted her pillows. As soon as he left, she'd grab the one he was just laying on and hug it to her chest - something she always did, motel stays just brought the added comfort of being able to cuddle his smell - but she didn't want him to see that.

Her eyes were shut as she felt him approach to turn off her nightstand, but they fluttered open as she felt him lean down and press a sweet kiss to her temple. She turned so that as he was coming up, for just a fraction of a second, their faces were right next to each other. Their eyes caught and she gave him a comfortable, sleepy smile. "Goodnight, Mulder."

He was silent for a beat to long, considering something before ultimately deciding on, "Goodnight, Scully."

Within a moment, he was gone. The only trace of him in the room being the pillow she pressed her lips against.


	5. In the Night

EZ8 Motel Bakersfield

Bakersfield, California

June 7th, 1999

5:57am

The first thing he felt was the bed dip beside him. The second was the hand on his cheek. The third was breath on his lips.

The third sensation was what made his eyes snap open, only to be met with a tangled mess of red hair obscuring his vision. "Scully," he rasped, confused, sleep still making his tongue heavy.

"It'd be you," she whispered so quietly he barely heard her, her breath shaky and nervous. She stroked his cheek lovingly with the tip of her nose while he gained his bearings.

"What do you-" he started, his breath catching as she straddled him, her thighs resting on either side of his hips while she looked down at him, her eyes dilated to the point of looking black.

"If an incubi tried to seduce me, he'd look like you," she whispered, tucking a loose piece of hair behind her ear, admiring him like it was the first time she'd ever _really _seen him. Something about the sweetness of such a simple gesture made his heart lurch as his breath caught in his throat at her words.

"Scully, I-" he began, only to be silenced by her index finger touching his bottom lip, staying there for a moment to play with it. She seemed mesmerized by the way it pulled and shifted when she tugged on it gently. She licked her lips almost unconsciously as she sat there in fascination. He felt himself holding his breath, afraid the slightest disturbance of this moment would send her running back to her room. This was uncharted territory for both of them, and he was more than content letting Scully navigate it at her own pace.

She looked at him and every fibre of his being wanted to reciprocate what she'd just revealed to him, but the gleam in her eye kept the words from forming. "I know" was all she'd exhaled before lowering herself fully, her chest coming down to rest on his as she captured his lips with her own. He jumped lightly at the shock of how cold she was; she wasn't lying when she said she was freezing earlier. Out of pure instinct, he wrapped his arms around her and rubbed up and down her back gently as he reveled in the sensation of her mouth on him, his groin stirring beneath her at the combination of the kiss and the fact he quickly discovered she wasn't wearing a bra.

Mulder felt the wetness of her tongue darting out to lap at his bottom lip and he opened his mouth so she could explore him fully. He'd always imagined this moment with great tentativeness, but Scully was eager, as if all the waiting they'd been doing for the past seven years had come to a head in this moment. She was kissing him with so much fervor, it felt like she was kissing him as if it might be her only chance. The notion was ridiculous; he'd give her anything he had to offer.

One hand slid up past the nape of her neck and came to a rest on the back of her head and she broke the kiss so she could hover over him. She touched his biceps and let her hands follow his arms all the way to his hands, leaving a trail of goosebumps along her path before interlacing their fingers and pinning them firmly to the bed on either side of his head. He let out a breathy laugh, husky with arousal, and she leered down at him with an almost predatory smile. He felt like the lamb about to be devoured by the lion, and seeing that look on _Scully's _face, of all people, was one of the hottest things he'd ever witnessed.

His eyes fluttered shut as she clamped her legs tight around him and pressed herself harder against him than she already was. Through the thin fabric of her shorts and the thin fabric of his boxers, he felt his erection rub right in between her swollen folds, making him grit his teeth as he inhaled shakily. His hips trusted upwards off the bed in a desperate attempt to grind against her and she laughed lightly.

She rocked forwards and pinned him to the bed with her weight, squeezing his still firmly grasped hands as she rocked against him. "Fuck, Scully," he groaned in the back of his throat as he squirmed underneath her. He couldn't believe this. _God, she was so beautiful._ She was still staring down at him intently, licking her lips absentmindedly as she watched his every reaction. It was as if she was getting off on him getting off on her.

While he loved dominant-Scully, he wanted to see her, he wanted to touch her, _Fuck, _he wanted to taste her. But everytime he tried to move, he felt paralyzed with pleasure, unable to move except for the gentle undulations of his hips against hers. While it was probably one of the single most erotic expereinces of his entire life, he wanted to fully experience Dana Scully.

"C-can I see you?" he asked, his voice sounding strained and choked.

She nodded simply and let go of him, easing herself upright all while maintaining eye contact. She raised her hands to the top button of her shirt and undid it, revealing a sliver of flesh that looked like it was glowing in the moonlight. The next button revealed the upper swell of her breasts and it suddenly became hard to swallow. The next one landed right in between the valley of her breasts and he could barely keep still. His legs shifted under her as he squeezed his thighs together, desperate to relieve some of the building tension brought on by the sensual display.

As his legs moved, he felt himself brush against the creamy skin of her calf which rested against his knee, but then something hard and sharp brushed against his own calf. Confusion nudged slightly through the haze of arousal as he couldn't figure out what that was. He tried to press into it again with his leg, but she tightened her legs against him like a vise, keeping him in place.

"Scully, what's wrong with your foot?" he asked softly, the question dying on his lips when his gaze met hers. It had turned to such an intense, strong focus, almost completely devoid of emotion, that it scared him. "Scully?" he repeated, louder this time.

Suddenly a loud crash broke the tension in the room and Scully's gaze shot to the source of the noise and his focus followed quickly after. Then, suddenly, his whole body lurched and he instantaneously became aware of his newfound ability to move again. His eyes focused and he saw a wide-eyed Scully staring at him with a look of pure fear on her face as she stood rigid in the doorway of their adjoining rooms. His focus shot back to where she had just been, only to see...nothing. "W-what?" he mumbled softly, almost to himself as his brain tried to catch up with what just happened.

"Mulder, are you okay?" Scully rushed, coming to his side almost immediately.

Realization dawned on him like ice water was injected into his veins and he felt his body tense in horror.

He was just attacked. That wasn't Scully.

"Mulder, look at me," the real Scully's voice called out from what felt like miles away even though she was right next to him. He felt her warm hands clasping his face and forcing him to look at her, trying to bring him back to reality. Her eyes were full of concern and startlingly blue in contrast to the darkness of the room. Especially startling in contrast to the black eyes he'd just been staring into.

"Can you hear me?" she asked, putting the back of her hand against his forehead while she desperately tried to take inventory of his condition.

Her voice wavered slightly and it just spoke volumes to the worry she was trying to mask. No one ever cared about him as much as she did, and he couldn't even fucking tell her apart from whatever _that_ was. He didn't think it was possible to feel worse than he did in this moment.

"Mulder, please say something!" she shouted suddenly, startling him with her volume and with the fierceness in which she grabbed his biceps and shook him. He noticed her eyes starting to mist over and that, more than anything, helped him find his voice.

"I-I don't think those men were dreaming," he croaked, his voice hoarse. He blinked his eyes repeatedly to try and get some wetness to them. He didn't need a mirror to know they'd be bloodshot just like the other men.

She shook her head softly. "I saw it," she admitted.

"Saw what?" he asked, feeling nauseous at the thought of her seeing him writhing under some imposter. His hands felt clammy and every bone in his body felt like it was made of lead.

"I-" she paused, trying to find her words, holding her hands in an unsuccessful attempt to hide their shaking from his gaze. "I don't know. It just looked like a black mass hovering over you. You were just on your back staring blankly at the ceiling. You looked like you were dea-" she broke off, shaking her head in a sick mixture of disbelief and shock.

He was certain that when she barged in, he'd been looking straight at the fake-Scully so he wasn't sure how much of what just happened actually happened. _God, he felt like he could barely form a thought. _"H-how did you know it was here?"

Her eyes flickered down to his still-tented boxers and she quickly averted her gaze. As best as he could in his weakened state, he grabbed the forgotten, bunched up comforter and drew it into his lap to hide his shame from her view. "I heard you making sounds," _God he wanted to disappear. _"But then it sounded like you were asking me something and I started to get concerned. You sounded...off," she explained.

The mention of the question reminded him of what had confused him in the first place. "I felt something sharp," he murmured, bending forward and moving his leg in an attempt to hit the object again. It wasn't there.

"Mulder, what happened?" she gently asked, just wanting to understand.

_The succubus attacked me pretending to be you and I wanted it to be real so badly that I blindly believed it. _The intense feeling of completion he'd felt, like his biggest dream had come true, felt absolutely cruel to him now. _He thought it was really happening, that Scully…_

Hot tears of frustration and sadness started stinging his eyes and he felt his throat starting to clench uncomfortably. Just another thing to add to his embarrassment in this moment. "I-I don't know," he stated measuredly through gritted teeth.

"Oh, Mulder," she murmured sadly, surprised by the show of emotion he apparently was doing a piss poor job covering. She moved fully onto the bed and sat cross legged next to him, rubbing his back in comfort. "Do you think it was what attacked the other men?" she asked carefully, trying to be delicate about the nature of the situation. If it wasn't the bloodshot eyes or the apparition she saw, he realized the familiar stench of rotting meat that had been following them crime scene to crime scene was lingering in his room.

He winced when her hand dipped lower on the bare skin and rubbed against something that caused a sharp, uncomfortable pain. She froze and scooted closer to him and examined his back, gasping at what must've been eight long marks that he didn't even remember getting.

"Yeah," he answered, rubbing his hand over his head. "It was the same thing as the other men."

She leaned away to turn on the bedside lamp, but he barely even noticed the light turned on, he just stared blankly at the wall in front of him as Scully resumed her inspection of his back. "Are they deep?" he asked, remembering the gashes Thomas Mayhew had received.

"No, they won't need stitches, but I have gauze in my bag and I would recommend wearing it so you don't bleed onto your clothes or aggravate your wounds," she told him, her touch feather light against his back.

"Mulder, what happened," she stated softly, sitting closer to his side so she could look at him.

Memories of the way the cops treated the other suspects flooded his mind and he felt a new wave of discomfort swallow him. "I don't want this to go on the record."

"I know it's uncomfortable-" she started, clearly ready to tell him it was necessary.

"I don't want-"

"You have to talk about it Mulder," she demanded, speaking over him. He was about to argue when she continued, "Mulder, this is a serious situation. You don't have to tell the police, they haven't done anything to help us anyway, but this is serious. We have to stop whatever just attacked you and I don't even know what the hell's going on!" she ranted, her voice wavering with the heightening of her emotions at the end.

She looked at him with pleading eyes and added, "I don't want to cause you any more discomfort, but I want to help you and I don't know how."

He relented, unable to argue with her. If the roles were reversed, he'd hate feeling helpless after seeing something like she just did. But he still didn't want to tell her the embarrassing details. "What happened to me was essentially exactly what the other men described. I couldn't move very well, I felt amazing," that part was said with audible disdain, "and I feel tired."

"Did you know it was a dream?" she asked.

"No, no I didn't. It felt real from the start," he sighed, the spoken truth just serving to mock him more.

"When did you know something was off?"

He thought back and tried to pinpoint a moment. Retrospectively he felt stupid for not recognizing the signs in his face: the restraining, the dominance, the sense of not being able to move. _Idiot. _"Um, I felt something sharp by my feet and that didn't make sense. Then the look in y-their eyes," he slipped.

"What was weird about it?" she asked, her eyes continually doing sweeps over his body as if she expected a drastic change.

"It hadn't looked like that the entire time. Then at the end, when I drew attention to what I felt, it looked infuriated," he replied.

"Infuriated?" she repeated.

"Yeah, like I'd ruined something." Even thinking of that look made his skin crawl. She'd looked at him like she wanted him dead. Evil.

Scully took a moment to digest this, nodding her head while she thought. "How long do you think it lasted."

"Keeping track of time wasn't really on my mind at the moment," he spat in self-deprecation. He was aiming the hostility at himself, but Scully winced nonetheless. "I don't know," he added, more gently this time, with a shrug.

There was a pregnant pause and he'd figured he'd accidentally offended her, but he realized she just replaying what happened to think of more questions. "Why were you calling my name? Did you know something was wrong and you were trying to call for help?" she asked.

If another wave of embarrassment hit him, he was sure he'd just drown in it. He looked over at her to see if she was really not getting it, and she was staring at him with innocent curiosity. "Scully," he groaned as he let his head fall into his hands, begging for her to realize it without him having to say it.

"Wh-? _Oh,"_ she gasped in surprise. He felt like every surface of his skin was blazing red with shame, and when he dared to glance at her, he saw she didn't look much different. Her eyes had widened and her lips were parted in shock. "I-I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-"

He held up his hand and pled, "Please." _Drop it. Spare me. Leave me with an ounce of dignity. _Were all unspoken endings to the statement and she luckily heard them loud and clear.

"I don't mean to be crude, but, um, did you come?" she asked hesitantly. If he weren't in such a piss poor mood he might have laughed at the fact she was asking a question usually only uttered by the male species.

"No," he replied flatly, the painful aching in his groin a reminder of that fact. "Why?" he asked.

"Well, you said that these 'demons' get power from ejaculation. I don't know as much about this as you do, but since you didn't-is that a good thing?" she asked, trying not to set him off but unable to stop asking questions out of her pure concern.

"I don't know, Scully. We haven't made an ounce of progress on this case. I don't know what the hell to do," he sighed in frustration.

He mustered the courage to look at her again and he felt sick when he saw her wide eyes and her bottom lip jutting out in a pout as she looked at him in concern. Her hair was ruffled from sleep and her clothes were lightly rumpled against her porcelain skin. She was beautiful, and he wished she wouldn't look at him.

"I'm not going to bed anytime soon. I'm going to take a shower," he mumbled, shucking the sheets away from him, not caring if she saw his erection being it's not like he had any modesty left.

"Mulder-" she began, but he cut her off by slamming the bathroom door behind him.

He flicked the light on and saw the image Jack Clarke had sent him, only this time it was his own face in the mirror. He debated on just shutting the lights off so he didn't have to see himself, but decided the last thing he needed was to slip and crack his head open. _Or maybe that would be better?_

He turned and examined the scratches on his back and they were like Scully described, not awful but not pretty. He tried to reach around to touch one as he heard Scully's voice faintly from the other room, probably calling someone to let them know what happened.

No matter how he twisted and turned, his hands were just ever so slightly off from being able to reach the marks, only passing touches before his shoulders would cry out in protest. He was starting to get frustrated when he heard a light knock on the bathroom door, which only added to his irritation.

With a huff, he grabbed the bathroom door and whipped it open, visibly making Scully jump in surprise. "What do you want?" he asked, the question coming out harsher than he wished it had.

Her bottom lip was still pouting and her brows were furrowed downwards. "Mulder, I just got a call," she began gently as if she could soften the impact of the blow.

"Jack Clarke is dead."


	6. Revelations

It'd been almost six hours since he was attacked, and would barely acknowledge her. Conversationally, it wasn't much better. It was like she was talking to a different man, he was unenthused, lethargic, and cold. She knew he was trying to cope with what had happened to him, but he was closing himself off. She couldn't even get him to look at her, anytime she caught his eyes, even for a fraction of a second, he looked away.

She was worried.

_Earlier that morning_

After the police called, she told Mulder they'd have to go to the crime and he said he needed to take a quick shower first. She understood and, while he was doing that, she found all the materials that would be needed for bandaging his back. However, when she knocked on the door again and tried to help him, he all but told her to fuck off.

"_Mulder, please. I've done it countless times before. It would only take a minute," she pled as he grabbed the gauze from her hands._

"_I can do it myself," he mumbled, throwing the materials into the sink._

"_But you won't be able to-"_

"_I'll manage," he grumbled as, for the second time in an hour, he slammed the door in her face._

Heat burned her cheeks and her eyes stung as she stood in the deafening silence of the room. There was no sound on the other side of the door and she wanted nothing more than for him to open the door and conceed, but no such luck. The faucett started running and she knew there was no getting on his good side in this moment.

She turned around slowly and her breath caught as she really took in the state of the bed. The fitted sheet was pulled from the mattress, the blankets were haphazardly tangled, and there was blood staining the sheets, undoubtedly from Mulder's back.

_What if she hadn't heard._

Her eyes flickered shut as the weight of that thought suffocated her. As much as she hated what just happened, she was just as thankful it wasn't worse. She wished Mulder would see it like that, but from the angry swearing coming from the other room as he most likely struggled to bandage himself, he wasn't in the mood for gratitude.

She decided to leave him alone, not wanting to get the brute of anymore of his hostility, and left to get ready. He wordlessly followed her to the car thirty minutes later and not a single word was exchanged on the ride over.

As soon as they stepped foot out of their car, they were quickly escorted to Jack Clarke's body which was reclining on a patio chair in the middle of his backyard. If it wasn't for the obvious rigormortis of his body, one might have assumed he was simply asleep.

A million different questions wanted to spill from her lips. So many observations she wanted to give a voice to, but there was a shared sense of dread between Mulder and herself that was already deafening. _Whatever happened to these men happened to Mulder and if they didn't figure out what to do, he'd end up dead._

She tried to swallow and realized there was a lump growing in her throat. She coughed lightly in an attempt to dispel it, the last thing Mulder needed was to see her cry over what felt like his inevitable death sentence. She adjusted the latex gloves that had been growing damp from the grip of her sweaty palm and moved to slip them on, fumbling slightly as her hands shook.

She saw Mulder walk towards the fire pit and she heard the snap of his gloves seconds before she'd finally gotten her own on. While he looked around, she stepped forward to examine the body, removing his sunglasses and setting them in an evidence bag. A gasp escaped her lips when she looked back at the body and saw it was looking at her.

Well...it felt like he was looking at her. The sclera of his eyes were so red that they gave off the appearance of being bloody and it was grotesquely unsettling.

She saw Mulder in her periphery look over at her when she gasped, but he didn't say anything as he walked away. Scully continued a physical examination of the body and noticed, aside from location, the body appeared to by much in the same condition as his friend's. There was even a noticeable wet spot on the front of his khaki pants. _But what killed him?_

Mulder had returned and had brought a long stick from the yard with him. "What's that for?" she asked, walking away from the body to join him at the fire pit.

He didn't respond immediately, instead choosing to prod the debris in the pit with the end of the stick. She heard something scrape against the metal bowl of the pit and she looked at Mulder who didn't react. He simply kept jabbing until he brought the source of the noise to the surface.

"He tried to burn the Ouija Board," Mulder stated flatly while the sunlight caught the metal planchette and sent a flare of light across their faces.

"Do you think that has something to do with his death?" she asked.

"It's essentially the one thing you aren't supposed to do with a Ouija board, other than use it in the first place," he answered, poking around some more and revealing the sun and moon of the board itself hadn't burned.

"Why?" She didn't even believe in this type of stuff, but it was the only thing they had to go on right now.

"It's said that doing so releases all the negative energy. Essentially, he opened the door for the spirits to come in and locked the door with them on the wrong side with no way to go back," he explained, throwing the stick in the yard carelessly.

"Hey," Mulder called out to one of the forensic examiners. "When you bag this, make sure no one comes into physical contact with it. Under no circumstances should anyone touch it." The kid looked puzzled, but agreed nevertheless.

She didn't even need to ask. "I think my attack has something to do with when I got burned yesterday," he murmured, trying to keep his volume down to avoid being heard.

"You think it attached to you?" She remembered how odd that situation had all been yesterday.

He let out a tired breath before kicking at the ground, "I don't know." She could tell he must've already been thinking that was the case since he'd grabbed the stick before touching the ashes and gave that command to the rest of the police department.

"That explains Mark and Jack since they touched it during the summoning, you grabbed it yesterday, but what about Thomas Mayhew? We don't have any evidence they knew each other," she mused, trying to think of any connections.

"I'll look into it while you do the autopsy," he responded, walking away from her before she had a chance to say anything. She watched as he walked away and she could see a faint red line seeping through the back of his shirt accompanied by the outline of unraveling bandages.

Kern County Coroner

Bakersfield, California

June 7th, 1999

12:15pm

Now it was past noon and she still hadn't heard a word from him and he wasn't returning her calls. The autopsy had come back just as she expected, much to her disappointment. Contrasting the entire situation, everything was completely normal. Scully couldn't help but think of what Jack had said, that it felt like his life was being drained out of him. That's really what it looked like, that their life had just slowly seeped away until there was nothing left.

The doors of the coroner's office creaked against the force Mulder pushed them open with. She got done with autopsy thirty minutes ago and, while he didn't get her call, he must've gotten her voicemail. She watched him scan the waiting room until he locked eyes with her. She smiled at him softly, but he didn't see it by the time he'd looked at the ground and started walking towards her.

"How'd it go?" he asked.

"I'm sorry, Mulder. The bodies aren't giving us any answers, they're all the same. No distinguishable cause of death. If it weren't for how young they were, and the strange circumstances, I would have said they just died in their sleep," she said with a sigh.

He let out a breath of frustration and she hoped he had better news. "What about you? What were you doing?"

"I got a subpoena for the job logs of Rankin Electric, so I spent the afternoon looking through them," he told her as if it was an obvious choice.

"Um, why?"

"Because last Thursday one Jack Clarke had an electrician sent to his home to fix the light fixture above his coffee table," Mulder answered.

Realization dawned on Scully as she remembered Clarke mentioning the electrician bumping into it and condemning it. "And you wanted to find out who it was and find out if they've been attacked."

"Didn't need to. The electrician sent out was a man named Thomas Mayhew," he said without joy at being proven right. For the first time being right was a condemnation. "I tried to call him and ask him about it, but he didn't answer and I noticed you'd called."

"Well…" she started. "That's a good sign isn't it?"

"How?" he asked flatly.

"Well, we haven't heard anything more from him, so maybe he's being left alone?" she offered.

"Well, Scully. I think the spirit was a little busy last night killing Jack Clarke and making an ass out of me," he spat.

"Mulder-" she began, attempting to negate the harshness of his internal criticism.

"Forget it, Scully. Let's go," he demanded, turning to leave.

Unable to take his attitude anymore, she grabbed him at the crook of the elbow, stopping him in his tracks and drawing his attention to her. He followed her when she dragged him into a hallway so they were away from prying ears, and she only let go when she was certain he wasn't going to run away. "Stop doing that," she chastised.

"Doing what?" he asked, unsure of what she meant.

"Hating yourself," she stated firmly.

He let out a breathy chuckle and she knew he was about to brush her off. "I mean it, Mulder. You were taken advantage of. You were attacked. You were sexually assaulted."

She was going to continue, but he interrupted her. "No, I was an active participant, Scully. I thought-" he broke off, not wanting to say the words _it was you._

"You thought it was something else. Exactly. You consented under agreement to terms that weren't true. Stop acting like you should have done this or should have done that. You behaved exactly as anyone would under that situation."

"Sure. Alright, Scully," he sighed defeatedly, shaking his head.

He moved to withdraw, but she wasn't done. She grabbed his arm and pulled her back, sternly asking, "Do you think I should beat myself up over what happened with Eddie Van Blundht?"

He scoffed and mumbled, "That's hardly the same thing."

"How is it different?"

"You weren't on the brink of having sex with Eddie Van Blundht," he whispered, noticing the people nearby trying to eavesdrop.

"Who knows how far it might have gone if you hadn't come in," Scully stated, standing her ground. She honestly didn't know the answer to that question, and the thought of how far it could have gone with how emotionally vulnerable she'd been at that time scared the life out of her and made her sick, she could only imagine how Mulder felt.

That must've broken through to him because he wasn't desperately trying to escape her line of questioning anymore. "I thought it was you," she admitted softly. He already knew that, obviously, but they never really talked about it. "I-I know I was cold to you after that for a while. Do you remember that?"

He looked at her for a moment, trying to figure out if this was a trap to get him in trouble. When he saw it wasn't he mumbled, "Yeah, you were distant."

"I was embarrassed. I probably felt near as shitty as you do right now. I was humiliated that I let him get that close to me. You barging in on that and seeing I was willing to..I don't even know what with you made me mortified. I assumed you just felt bad for me. I felt like I ruined the dynamic of our partnership when I had the false hope that we might have been-" she stopped suddenly, realizing she was getting too caught up in the moment.

She may have been revealing more than she intended, but it seemed to be having an effect. "N-no, Scully. I didn't think anything like that. I was just mad at _him _for playing with our relationship, not you."

"Exactly. I'm just upset that whatever attacked you could have killed you and god knows what else," she reiterated.

He still looked skeptical, decidedly not a role he should be filling in their partnership, and mumbled, "It's different though, Scully. You just thought I was trying to take you on an awkward date, that's not completely insane. I was blindly willing to believe that you'd just jump my bones spontaneously in the middle of the night because I so badly wanted it to be true," he explained in exasperation.

Her shock at his admission must've been evident on her face because he sighed in frustration and he kicked at the ground while lacing his fingers behind his neck. "In that case, I'm the bigger idiot," she said, knowing if she started showing even a hint of the self-hate he was exuding that he'd start to defend her own honor to herself.

"You're anything but an-"

"No, Mulder. The reason I didn't recognize it wasn't you was because we were in a situation we normally haven't been in. However, we've had conversations before. We've even had a drink or two together. I had so many more variables to be able to compare Eddie to you and recognize the difference, but I didn't. How was there any way for you to tell that wasn't me? We-we've never done anything like _that_ before," she explained, wishing that she didn't sound like an awkward teenage girl when the topic of them being merely hypothetically intimate came up.

"Shouldn't that have been sign enough?" he muttered, looking off to the side to avoid looking at her.

She swallowed the lump that was forming in her throat and tried to ignore the embarrassed flush that was covering her face as she built up the courage to say her next statement. Mulder had been dancing on the line for a long time now. She was ready to set it on fire. "Why do you act like it's not obvious we're attracted to each other?" she declared, the words hot on her tongue and coming out a little louder than she anticipated.

His eyes shot back to hers and it took every ounce of willpower to resist lowering her gaze to her feet. Her heart was pounding rapidly in her chest and her entire body felt clammy. "What?" he whispered, the breath sounding like the ghost of a question he was to afraid to ask.

"If I'm being presumptuous, I'll tuck my tail between my legs and accept it and move on," she started, putting her defense mechanism in place. "But, I think there's been something between us for a long time now. Sexual tension is just the tip of the iceberg, but it's there." Mulder looked like he was frozen to the spot and she thought she was about to combust into flames. There was no going back now.

"Maybe I misconstrued your banter as flirting, maybe I interpreted your behavior to fit what I wanted, but I was under the impression the only thing stopping us from...progressing our relationship was fear of the unknown, which is stupid now that I think about being we've spent our damn lives surrounded by the unknown." She was rambling now and she wished she was speaking more eloquently, she felt like everything she was saying wasn't right or wasn't capturing the depths of her feelings well enough.

"Scully-" he started, only to be interrupted by her for the millionth time this conversation.

With the last vestige of her confidence, after standing up straighter and looking him dead in the eye, she firmly declared: "If an incubus came into my room last night, he'd look exactly like you. I would have accepted any advance 'you' made towards me, I would have considered it the best night of my life, and I would have been so happy that we finally stopped _fucking_ pretending once and for all."

She was left breathless after all but screaming at him. Her chest was heaving and she felt the wetness on her cheeks from tears she hadn't even realized were forming. With the way he looked she was worried she might have sent him catatonic shock.

The reality of all she admitted started to catch up with her and, as usual, all she wanted to do was run away. With finality, she seethed, "So stop beating yourself up, Mulder. It wasn't ridiculous." She turned to rush to the nearest restroom and had made it less than five feet before his hand gently grabbed her wrist and made her stop in her tracks.

She didn't turn to face him in fear of the rejection she'd see there, but he wasn't having it. Mulder put his hand on the side of her jaw and nudged her to look at him. The amount of unfiltered love he was looking at her with was overwhelming. "You were right. About everything. I don't like that I was attacked, but I was devastated that I thought we'd finally stopped _fucking _pretending," he explained, smiling as he used her own words. "Only to realize it was a lie. And I was humiliated that you knew and I was just embarrassed," he rambled, getting as tongue tied as she had earlier.

She smiled softly at him and he smiled back, both unsure of what to say now that they'd bared their purest feelings to each other. She felt exposed, but it wasn't bad. Just new. "I-" Scully began.

"Agents!" A voice interrupted, making them jump and step away from each other, turning their heads to look at the cop several meters away.

"What?" Mulder called out, clearly irritated while he walked towards the man.

She trailed behind him, but stopped cold in her tracks as she heard the boy yell "Tom Mayhew was found dead in his bed this morning under mysterious circumstances."

Mulder looked over his shoulder at her and his face reflected the same fear that she was currently feeling. All the men who had been visited by this demon were now dead. All but Mulder.

And they had no idea what to do and no idea how long they had left.


	7. Last Hopes

Mayhew Residence

Bakersfield, California

June 7th, 1999

1:42pm

Mulder watched as Scully all but jumped out of the car when they pulled up to the house. "Mrs. Mayhew, I'm so sorry," he heard her say as she made her way towards the bawling woman standing next to a few officers. Mulder quickly walked up to stand a pace behind Scully, not wanting to bother the woman with introductions.

"D-Dana," the woman shouted, reaching out for Scully. I don't know what happened," the woman cried, her face swollen with tears and her voice straining to even get the words out. The sentence was punctuated by harsh sobs and Scully grabbed the woman's hands and helped her walk over to the porch so the woman could sit down. "I-I don't know what that was," the woman keened, clutching her hands to her chest.

Mulder felt his heart break at the woman's grief. The other men had brought this on themselves out of loneliness, but this couple were just affected by association. Scully sat next to her and rubbed her back while whispering words of comfort. Without trying, an image flashed in his mind of the roles being reversed, Scully sobbing hysterically as someone tried to piece together her shattered world. His head turned as he heard a thudding sound and he saw a body covered by a sheet being rolled out on a gurney. _That was the role he'd be filling._

The reality of that possibility made his knees weak, so he took a seat across from the women and pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket, handing it to Scully so she could give it to the woman. "Kate," Scully whispered softly, drying some of the elderly woman's tears herself before giving the cloth to her. "What did you mean by you didn't know what 'that' was?"

"Something attacked us," Kate whimpered.

"Attacked?" Mulder repeated, leaning forward.

She nodded, "I-I tried to help him, I screamed and tried to push the thing off him but it was like I wasn't even there."

"Kate, what was it that attacked him?" Scully asked, continuing to rub the woman's back.

"I don't know," she whimpered. "It was evil."

"What makes you say that?" Mulder asked.

"I couldn't push it off, but it looked at me and it had these intense red eyes. I was scared so I started to pray and it-it _screamed," _she rambled, getting emotional at the thought.

"I know this is hard Kate, but you're doing a great job," Scully murmured, trying to calm the woman down as Kate grabbed Scully's free hand into her own.

"What did it look like?" Mulder asked, giving her a moment to blow her nose.

"It, um," she sniffled. "It looked like a woman, but not quite."

"Not quite?" Scully prompted.

The woman's eyes squeezed shut, shaking her head as if to dispel the image from staying there for too long. "It was completely black, like a mist, except for the eyes. But...the _feet..._they weren't feet."

Mulder felt his body tense up as he remembered his own attack. _Scully, what's wrong with your foot?_ The intense look Scully gave him told him she was on the same page. "What were they?" he asked tentatively.

The woman bit her lip and looked down, a stray tear falling. "I know I sound crazy…" she trailed off quietly.

"Ma'am, we promise to take everything you say seriously. What you're describing is similar to other recent attacks. We just need you to be as honest as possible so we can prevent a tragedy like this from happening again," Mulder reassured, speaking objectively to avoid just making it about himself.

She nodded slightly before hoarsely whispering, "They were hooves."

Mulder felt a chill run through his body. _Hooves_. "Are you certain?" Scully asked, her voice revealing her surprise.

Another sniffle. "I grew up on a farm, I know a pair of hooves when I see 'em."

It checked out with the research he'd been continuing to do. Usually in succubi or incubi encounters, the figure resembled a person, but one thing was usually off. A beak instead of a nose, talons instead of hands, and, in this case, hooves instead of feet. "I saw the hooves and the eyes and that's when I started praying."

"Did the demon say anything when it screamed?" Scully asked.

"I'm not sure, that's-," her face started crumpling inwards on itself as a new wave of grief hit her. "-that's when Tommy started trying to defend himself."

Scully looked at Mulder to see if he caught what she just had. "He was able to fight back?" he prompted.

She nodded with her bottom lip quivering, clearly distraught at the last memory of her husband. "When she looked at me, he just bolted upright and started trying to push it away."

"Did the figure disappear when he bolted up?" Scully asked, clearly thinking of what she'd seen herself.

Kate sobbed loudly and buried her face in her hands, her whole body shaking with the force of her cries. Scully's brows furrowed with the downward curve of her lips as she leaned closer to Kate. "I'm so sorry, I promise we're almost done. You've been extremely helpful," she soothed.

The woman uncovered her face, her eyes remaining clamped shut as she gathered her strength. "They struggled for a while, sometimes Thomas would get out of her grasp, but then she'd pull him back," she explained.

Then she turned to Scully as her voice trembled, "I tried to help him, I did. When I got too close to the creature, I'd get overwhelmingly dizzy. I ran to get the phone, but the bedroom door slammed shut and I couldn't get it open, it wouldn't open for hours." That must've been why the call came in so late even though he died in the early morning. Mulder felt nauseated when he realized that meant she was trapped with her husband's body for hours.

"Mrs. Mayhew," Scully stated firmly, "You did all you could. You can't blame yourself for anything that happened."

"I don't understand what's happening," she croaked. _That makes three of them. _

While he didn't have a definitive answer, he had to let her know at least the bare minimum. Her entire world was destroyed and she deserved to at least know why. "We think that when Thomas went out for a job, he accidentally ran into a client who had been dabbling into the dark arts."

Scully gave him a warning look not to push it. "Dark arts?" Kate asked, concern evident in her tone.

"Thomas's client was the one who called us in because he believed he had summoned a demon, and he mentioned his electrician had accidentally seen his occult paraphernalia," Mulder explained.

"Thomas hated stuff like that," she said softly.

Mulder nodded, knowing that from Clarke's retelling, "We think his exposure to it allowed an entity to attach to him."

"So it's gone?" she asked hopefully.

"It's drawn to men, so you're safe," Mulder responded.

Her attention was drawn to the police who were examining the house for clues. Her face started to become expressionless as if she was recognizing for the first time that her home was a crime scene. Scully realized at the same time he did that she was going into shock and they needed to get the last bit out before they lost her. They didn't have a lot of time to spare and they didn't want to make her relive it later. "Mrs. Mayhew. We're almost finished. I promise. I know it's hard, but we need to know. How did Thomas die?"

"It was like she siphoned the life out of him," she replied, her voice high and tight as it came out from her clenched jaw.

"How?" Scully asked softly.

"They fought for a while, but he got so tired. Then she got on top of him and..._kissed _him, but it lasted for what felt like hours. I could see Thomas getting paler and that he was having a hard time staying awake. I begged her to stop-" she broke off.

While medically it was hard to justify, it made absolute sense when thinking of how the victims described feeling. She took bit by bit until ultimately taking everything they had, leaving the victims exhausted until they had no energy left. "When...When he was dead," she continued. "The room got really warm and then she was gone. Like she'd never even been there."

"But you still couldn't get out of the room?" He asked.

"No, the door doesn't even have a lock, and there's no way it could have been barricaded."

"Mom!" A voice cried out from further down the lawn.

They all turned to see a woman around their age running through the grass towards them. Mrs. Mayhew stood up suddenly and walked passed them so she could embrace the crying woman. He turned and saw Scully's lips were pursed as she took in the new information with sadness. _He had a family._

"I just saw him last week. He was fine," the daughter sobbed.

Mulder stood while he heard Mrs. Mayhew say, "They said he went in his sleep, honey. It was time." _She was sparing them and keeping the tragic secret to herself._ Scully's eyes fluttered shut as she undoubtedly understood the reality that this woman lost her husband and would live the rest of her life bottling up her trauma. She deserved so much better.

"But why are the police here?" the daughter asked.

"Any time 9-1-1 is called, we have to come," he answered as they neared, helping the woman the only way he knew how. "We're so sorry for your loss. Both of you," he stated genuinely. Mrs. Mayhew gave him a small smile in appreciation, and they left her to comfort her daughter.

As they walked away, Scully exhaled slowly and rubbed her temples with one hand. "Are you alright?" he asked, letting his hand rest on the small of her back.

"I can't even begin to imagine what that woman went through," she revealed quietly.

"They didn't deserve this," he agreed.

"Neither do you," she said, addressing the elephant in the room. "Mulder, you know I have a hard time believing in something so...unusual, but I don't know how to explain any of this and I don't want this thing to come for you," she admitted, adding "again" as an afterthought.

If Scully was willing to believe in paranormal demons, they were really running out of options. He opened the car door for her and saw concern painting her face as she got lost in her own thoughts. He agreed with her, he most certainly didn't want a revisitation and he certainly didn't want to lose the opportunity he'd just been given.

Scully admitted she has feelings for him. He'd imagined it countless ways, spent hours thinking about how he'd admit it to her, indulged thousands of fantasies about finally being able to act on those feelings, but never did he anticipate these would be circumstances to cause the truth to come out. They were so worried, they haven't even gotten a chance to talk about the step they'd finally made. It was small, but it meant the world to him.

He didn't want to die before he had the chance to fully show her how much she means to him.

The car was silent with the exception of a sardonically happy pop song about life. He glanced over and saw Scully's bottom lip was swollen and trapped between her teeth, something she tended to do when she was stressed. Taking another small step forward, he let his right hand slide off the steering wheel and reach out to grab hers.

He felt her tense in surprise before interlocking her fingers with his silently and giving him a gentle squeeze. Her skin was smooth and her hand was tiny compared to his, even so, she managed to rub the back of his hand soothingly with her thumb. It felt way too good for him to resign to a fate where he wouldn't be able to do it again thousands of times in the future.

"Hey, we've been in worse situations," he laughed, trying to lighten the mood. It earned a small smile of indulgence from Scully that didn't even begin to reach her eyes.

He hoped what he said wasn't a lie.

EZ8 Motel Bakersfield

Bakersfield, California

June 7th, 1999

10:37pm

To be quite frank, they were approaching what he'd been dreading all day. _Bedtime. _

He sat on Scully's bed much like he had last night, only now the air was tense with fear instead of innuendo. Today had been a waste in terms of progress towards an answer. All the men were dead and they were just as confused as they were when they started. They'd gotten back two hours ago, but succumbing to their exhaustion felt like embarking on a death march. A funeral procession they couldn't escape. Instead of submitting, they fought through their yawns and grasped at the only straws they had.

"What do you think it was that allowed Thomas freedom of movement?" Scully asked, idly fiddling with the hem of her lavender silk pajama top.

"It might have been in response to the prayer. It might have bothered the succubi so she screamed to drown it out," he mused.

"I'm curious if the demon was distracted and he was able to move because her attention wasn't fully on him, or if the prayer itself weakened it," she mused.

He knew what she was focused on by her questioning. She wanted to know what he could do to fight back. "I'm not sure. Historically in exorcisms, prayers are recited constantly by an assistant to the priest to subdue the demon. So it's not out of the question."

"I don't think it likes having an audience," Scully added.

"What do you mean?"

"When I came in earlier, it looked straight at me and disappeared. In the Mayhews case, it lost its power temporarily because of Mrs. Mayhew."

"Then why lock her in with them instead of letting her leave?" he asked.

Scully shrugged as she considered this. "Maybe as an act of punishment? What better revenge than something as cruel as killing her husband in front of her?"

"Why did it act maliciously against Mrs. Mayhew, but disappear when you came in?" he asked, the fact he was comparing Scully and him to a wife and her husband was not lost on him.

"Well," she paused, "Maybe one of two things. First, no one has ever died after their first visitation," she offered.

"That's true. How many had it been for everyone? Jack Clarke's case sounded like four or five times," he added.

"He made it sound like Mark had been visted three or four times, which odd that it was less even though he died sooner. And," she started uncomfortably, "Thomas was twice." The last word rung darkly in the room.

"Maybe it has something to do with interest," he replied.

"What do you mean?" Scully asked, shifting on the bed so she was sitting cross legged with her elbows resting on her knees so she could lean towards him.

"Clarke was admittedly excited about doing the seance, it could even be said maybe it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't agreed with his friend. His friend had apparently immediately started calling Clarke about his fear of what they'd done. Mayhew didn't want anything to do with it, but he'd been so eager when he thought it was his wife. It seems like the spirit doesn't like it when there's disinterest aimed towards it, or when people start to figure her out," he explained.

Scully nodded, "That's not bad, and it sort of goes with my other idea." She licked her lips and took a breath before saying, "You're the only one who didn't finish. When I came in, maybe the connection was broken so quickly because you, um, hadn't 'given an offering' as one would say, to this entity." She avoided eye contact while saying this and he could see she was embarrassed at bringing it up, but it did make sense.

"That's a good point," he reassured. "Do you think there's a chance maybe now that I know, I won't be revisited since um, I didn't consummate our relationship, for lack of a better phrase."

"No. I think she will because you're the only person she has left." She wasn't wrong. Being all the open cases of strange activity had ended in death, the case was closed. Since the officers didn't even take it seriously to begin with, they were more than willing to let Scully and him take the evidence 'for the archives'. In actuality, they took it outside city limits and buried it, taking comfort in the hope that no one would ever uncover it or touch it.

So he really was the last chance the demon had for getting any more offerings to keep it alive. The thought made his palms sweat. He was lost in thought and didn't realize what Scully had just asked him.

"What?" he asked, realizing she was biting her lip again.

She tucked her hair behind her ear, and a little more loudly, asked, "You kissed it, didn't you?"

He felt a blanket of awkwardness fall over them as the topic came up. Admitting kissing the creature was him essentially telling her that he'd kissed her. It was already obvious, but she still didn't know the full extent of what happened and, if he knew Scully-which he did, the curiosity was killing her. "Yeah. A few times," he answered honestly.

"Do you think that might be how it kills?" she asked.

He thought back, to be honest, he assumed he was lightheaded from the fact 'Scully' was kissing him, but looking back knowing what he knew now, it made sense. "Yeah, I do. I think that's how she sucks out your energy to make you weak and docile."

He saw Scully recognize his shift to speaking in the second person and her lips quirked downwards at the attempted dissociation. "Would it help to talk about it?" she offered softly, not pushing him.

She deserved to know, after all, it did involve her in a messed up way. That and he remembered how much he'd wanted to know what happened after the Eddie Van Blundht situation. He'd been upset that they'd essentially 'had a conversation' that she knew about while he was left in the dark, even though it ended up all being fake. It still had been him she'd been reacting to at the time, to her knowledge, and he wanted to know.

"I'm embarrassed," he admitted, swallowing his urge to hide. If he wanted her to know how much she meant to him, he had to be honest.

She reached out and grabbed his hand, squeezing it in her own. "Mulder, you have nothing to be embarrassed about."

He didn't acknowledge what she said, other than taking in a huge breath of air. "When I woke up," he began, feeling her grip on his hand tightened as she realized he was going to tell her the honest truth. "You, or what had appeared to be you, crawled into my bed. Um, I asked if you were alright and you straddled me," he remembered vividly how the bed had dipped under her weight, how real she'd felt.

Then he suddenly perked up as he realized something. "Oh my god," he whispered.

"What?" Scully asked, taken aback by his sudden movement.

He stared blankly for a moment, then deciding there was nothing he could do about it, said, "It was listening to us."

Her brow furrowed at his statement, "What do you mean?"

"The reason I hadn't questioned anything was off initially was because it felt like you'd been continuing our conversation we'd just been having," he explained.

"What did it say to you?" she asked.

"Um, you-it, said that if an incubi came to you, that it'd look like me," he murmured. He wiped his face and she didn't respond, knowing he was debating saying something. "It, uh, our conversation yesterday when we went to bed felt so charged and, um, I think I had just thought you had been thinking about it and took that as an opportunity to…" he trailed off, making indistinguishable hand signals as if one would represent what he meant.

"Seduce you?" Scully offered.

He let out a breath, "Yeah."

"I wish I was that smooth," she joked, actually smiling for what felt like the first time in a while.

He smiled back at her and a comfortable silence fell on them for a moment. His eyes flicked down to their connected hands and he took in the image, her perfectly manicured nails dwarfed by his large, calloused ones. The sight was so encompassing of them that he felt the words tumble from his lips in a soft whisper. "I'm sorry I hadn't realized it wasn't you."

"Mulder," she said sternly, making him return his gaze to her face. "You said it yourself, she was listening to us. She knew what to say to trick you. How to impersonate me." She uncrossed her legs so she could scoot closer to him so she was sitting next to him. She ran a hand through his hair comfortingly. "You couldn't have known," she added in a whisper.

"It's probably listening right now," he added in a hushed tone, but accepting there was nothing they could do about it.

Then, out of the blue, she requested, "I want you to stay in here tonight." He turned to her, without a doubt a look of surprise plastering his face. She looked shy, but adamant, "I think we have a better chance of beating this thing if we're together."

"I'm not disagreeing with you, Scully, but we don't know how to fight it and…" he trailed off.

_I don't want you to watch me die._

He didn't say it, but she knew. "I can't sit by and do nothing," she whispered, her voice breaking though she remained straight faced. "You told me before that there were ways to defeat succubi. Jack Clarke had been trying and you mentioned two things, what were they?" she asked.

He thought back and remembered what he'd seen in his research. "One method is stabbing it with a holy item or silver."

"Holy item? Like a cross?" Scully asked.

"Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. The other method is to trap it in a mirror and then smash it," he explained.

"How do you trap it?"

"They say succubi are so vain that they inevitably will have to look at themselves and get sucked in. Literally," he responded.

She nodded, digesting this, before rolling off the bed. "Do you have your pocket knife?" she asked, walking towards the bathroom.

"Yeah, why?" he asked.

"Get it for me," she called out, blocked from his view by the wall.

He did as he was asked and turned around to see Scully had pulled the bathroom mirror from the wall and set it by the bed, setting what appeared to be a makeup compact down on the nightstand. He felt his heart lurch when he realized what she was doing. _She was preparing for battle to save him._

"Can I see it?" she asked, her hands open to catch it.

He tossed it to her while saying, "Yeah, but I'm not sure if it's silver."

"That's fine," she answered, setting it next to the compact. "Can I borrow one of our shoelaces?"

"Why?" he asked, but his answer was the sound of the motel room door closing.

He just smiled to himself as he unlaced one of his shoes that had been sitting on the floor. He had just finished by the time she came back, carrying two sticks. She took the string offered to her and wordlessly bound them together and he realized she was making a cross. "Well aren't you a junior MacGyver?" he laughed.

She shrugged, holding the finished product up proudly. "Girl scouts," she smiled.

Scully set the cross on the nightstand with the rest of her weapons before returning to the door and making sure it was locked. "What time is it?" she called out.

"About 11:30," he replied.

She nodded, turning off some of the lights around the room solemnly. "We can't wait forever," she sighed.

The sound of her little feet padding over to the bed sounded deafening as the reality he was about to share a bed with her sank in. Yet another milestone being tainted by the threat of a demon. Scully didn't say anything as she slid into bed, getting under the covers, but not before taking one last glance at her arsenal and deciding to slide her compact into the pocket of her shirt.

He followed her under the covers, making sure there was a respectable amount of distance between them even though there was no way he could avoid feeling her body heat radiating towards him. He turned off his lamp and she did the same, plunging them into darkness. The only illumination in the room poured in from the moonlight behind the blinds, but it was enough for him to see her features as she rolled over to face him.

Turning on his side to mirror her, they wordlessly spent a moment just enjoying this moment. A small luxury in a situation like this. He felt her hand reach out a few inches to grab his and he held onto it like a lifeline which, in all honesty, it was. "Mulder," she whispered.

"Yeah?" he murmured quietly.

"When this is all over-" she took a pause, feeling his thumb with her own as she gathered her courage. "I...I want to talk more about what we were discussing in the hallway before we were interrupted."

He let out a little breath of laughter and before she could misinterpret it said, "That seems to be our M.O. doesn't it? Interrupted confessions in hallways?" He saw the white of her teeth as she smiled in recognition of their misfortune. "But," he continued, growing more serious. "I do too, Scully. I don't want to keep avoiding it."

"I'm scared," she admitted.

He knew she wasn't just talking about their situation, though that was definitely adding to it, but this was years in the making finally coming to a head. "Me too," he replied honestly. "But I know I can face anything with you by my side."

It was cheesy, but they both knew it was true regardless, their shy smiles admitting as much. "Mulder?" she started before quickly adding, "Nevermind."

"No, what?" he asked, nuzzling into the bed to get more comfortable.

"It's not appropriate with the situation. It can wait until later," she reassured, licking her lips.

He would have let it slide if it hadn't been for that. For that and the way her eyes had momentarily focused on his lips before dismissing her own request. He understood why she hadn't wanted to ask given what they were just talking about and what they were about to face, but it didn't mean he couldn't.

Raising ever so slightly on his elbow, watching her eyes follow his as he heard her breath hitch, he leaned over her and lowered himself slowly until his lips were pressed against hers in a sweet kiss.

This was what he'd expected, what he wanted. _This _is what kissing Dana Katherine Scully, his partner and his best friend, felt like. It didn't last more than ten seconds and it was as soft as it was gentle, but feeling their lips press against each other was the most perfect sensation he'd ever experienced.

He let up and returned to his earlier position just in time to see her eyes flutter open and a pleased smile tug on her lips. "Thank you," she whispered.

"I can assure you, the pleasure is all mine," he teased, watching as she nuzzled into the bed, still facing him.

"I'll keep you safe, Mulder," she promised.

"I trust you," he responded. Within twenty minutes, they were asleep, hands intertwined and soft snores filling the room.

They were in such a deep sleep, they didn't even notice the sheets being pulled off the bed.


	8. Reflection

EZ8 Motel Bakersfield

Bakersfield, California

June 8th, 1999

2:03a.m.

_Mulder, wake up._

_Mulder! Please!_

_Oh my god…_

His eyes fluttered open as he heard Scully call out from what felt like miles away. Immediately, he recognized the vision of Scully kneeling next to him. He blinked the sleep away the best he could and sat up and said, "Scully, what's wrong?"

She had his pocket knife in hand, poised in a fighting stance, and was trembling ever so slightly, looking at him while flickering her gaze around the room. "I-it was here," she whispered, her voice quivering.

"What happened?" he asked, raising a hand to brush tangled strands of hair from her face. A single tear rolled down her face while her bottom lip trembled and he realized how upset she was.

"It...it was just _on you," _she all but spat, furiously looking at the bed. "I-I grabbed the mirror, but she slapped it out of my hand and it shattered. I, um, I grabbed this," she explained, holding up his knife. "I ran over and stabbed it in the back. Or at least, I think I did. It screamed and disappeared completely, but then you didn't wake up."

"Hey, _hey," _he whispered, getting her attention by cupping her jaw. He could tell how much this was bothering her and he wasn't sure what to say to comfort her. His heart broke at the way she trembled and the tears streaming down her cheeks.

"You did it, Scully," he reassured with a smile.

"When the mirror didn't work, I thought it might have been too late," she admitted, letting the knife close and fall to the bed with a dull thud.

"I guess the knife is silver after all, wasn't it?" he laughed out of relief. What if she'd tried with something else and it hadn't worked? Silver makes them disappear on simple touch.

She looked at the knife and smiled a toothy grin, almost to herself, "yeah, I guess it is."

"You saved my life, Scully," he stated with a nervous breath. He would have died if it wasn't for her.

She looked at him with so much intensity it hurt. "I almost lost you," she whispered. Then, surprising them both, she lurched forward and captured his lips in a kiss. She pressed against him with so much force, he ended up laying on his back as she slid over him. He felt a tear hit his cheek as she swiped his bottom lip with her tongue.

She wasn't quite directly on him, her ass resting on the top of his pubic bone, but he had no doubts she could probably feel his erection as it grew steadily beneath her. "I can't believe it's over," she mumbled into his mouth.

"Me _mph_either," he replied, the words getting muffled on her lips. He really couldn't… he went to bed thinking he'd die in the night and now he'd awakened to this. It didn't feel real.

He started to move and she pinned his arms to the bed. Flashes of the last time this happened were prominent in his head, making him gasp in shock at the vividness. "Scully-" he started gently.

"Shhh," she whispered, kissing him while rubbing herself lower on him.

_He needed up, this was too similar to- _"Scully, I don't w_mpf." _She cut him off with a firm kiss.

She kept him there and, while he understood she was high on adrenaline, he didn't want to be uncomfortable while displaying any intimacy with Scully. "Let me make you feel better," she sweetly stated, smiling before kissing him again.

Before she had a chance to stop him, he slid his wrist out of her grasp and grabbed her hand, gently pushing it against her chest so she wouldn't try to pin him again. "Scully, I'm sorry, but-"

He felt his mouth go dry when he noticed her nails were sharp, long, and pointed. Like claws.

_They resemble humans, but there's always something they just don't get right._

It all made sense. Scully from last night hadn't even wanted to kiss him out of fear it would make him uncomfortable, she would never do this without even asking it it was okay. He wouldn't be tricked a second time.

Narrowing his eyes he coldly stated, "You're not Scully."

Scully's blue dilated eyes lost all color as the black pupil spread out to cover her entire eye, a look of pure malice and hatred replacing the faux affection the demon had been trying to mimic.

He looked over and saw that he couldn't see real Scully laying on the bed next to him. _He was really trapped in this dream. _He didn't know how to break the reality, so at the top of his lungs he screamed, "_SCULLY!"_

Within a split second, he was on his back, looking up at the ceiling. _Fuck, fuck, fuck. _The demon covered his view and a sick smile spread across its face which was grotesquely becoming a combination of Scully and something not entirely human. "You. Are. _Mine." _It demanded, Scully's voice still evident but deep baritone accompanying it simultaneously.

He ignored the way the creature squirmed on him and instead focused on miscellaneous things around the room and how he could use them to get out of this. _If only he could fucking move._

"What? Is this not good enough for you?" it asked before quickly morphing into a completely naked Scully. He felt his body react at the visual stimulation, but he did everything he could to ignore it.

"Come on, _Mulder," _the thing whimpered, mimicking Scully completely and realistically. The voice sounded exactly like his nightly fantasies of Scully did, breathy and aroused, and he grew concerned that the thing was more powerful than he'd given it credit for. "You know you want this. You've thought about it for so long. I know you want to fuck me," it cooed in a husky voice, leaning up and fondling Scully's imaginary breasts.

He clamped his eyes shut, not wanting to see this. It felt like a violation of himself as well as Scully. His eyes were forced open by something besides himself and it was now Scully in the pyjamas he'd just seen her in. "Or do you like her clothed more?" it asked, leaning down while nestling against Mulder's now painful hard on.

He turned his head the best he could and closed his eyes again. He felt the pressure on him lessen slightly, as if she'd stopped straddling him and was now kneeling at his side again as he heard a loud scream. He felt his body lighten and he realized quickly that he could move.

_Scully must've done something._

Knowing he might not have time, he lurched forward and forced the thing down onto the bed, straddling it and pinning its arms onto the mattress. The demon had proven to be a good actor so far, and it took every ounce of himself to ignore how much the situation was disturbing him.

It was looking up at him with Scully's wide blue eyes, filled with fear, his hands gripping her wrists so hard that he felt like he could feel her heartbeat. "Mulder, it's me!" she cried out, struggling against him.

"Leave me alone!" he screamed in her face, shaking her once harshly. He looked up, still unable to see Scully, and screamed again, "Scully, help me!"

"Mulder! It's m-" he bent down and covered her mouth with his hand, his fingers digging into the side of her face cruelly as he tried to figure out a way to get to Scully's collection on the nightstand without letting go of the demon. He could feel her trying desperately to speak under his hand and saw big wet tears gathering in her eyes. _This thing really knew how to tap into his weakness and make him uncomfortable._ It bothered him to no end to even think of himself being in this position with Scully, let alone to have it feel like it was real.

He could feel her feet kicking at his legs, trying to push his much larger body off of her, and he wondered what real-Scully was doing. Mr. Mayhew could barely fight back, let alone for this long. He let go of her with one hand and quickly tried to lurch forward and grab something from the nightstand...but it was all gone.

Her free hand reached up and he could feel her manicured nails scratching at his fingers, occasionally ripping his hand from her mouth enough to plead "mirr-" or "muld-" or "pleas-", but he ignored her and tried to find something he recognized. But he couldn't.

In fact, everything was moved. He looked around and all he could find was the bathroom mirror laying on the bed. In it, he could see the reflection of him pinning Scully to the bed, and a black angry mass was staring at him furiously from inside the mirror itself.

His shock lessened his hold on Scully, and she ripped her mouth from underneath his hand, screaming. "Mulder, the mirror! Break the mirror!"

His brain still couldn't catch up with who was who and what was what, but he fell off Scully like she was on fire and she quickly scrambled away and slid off the bed. Within a second, she had grabbed the mirror and was throwing it to the ground as hard as she could, a horrible, otherworldly screaming sound reverberating off the walls of the motel room followed by the shattering of glass.

Then, almost immediately, the room felt warmer and that stench of rotting meat went away like it had never even been there in the first place. Scully stood there looking at the ground, heaving breaths wracking her form, as she shakily reached out for the bed.

He crawled a bit closer to the edge of the bed, closer to her, and peered over to see shards of shattered glass littering the floor. Glancing a little further over, he saw an array of collected weapons on the ground. "Nothing else worked," she whispered, answering his unspoken question, her breathing still a little ragged.

"Wh-what just happened?" In this moment, he felt like a scared little kid where everything was out of his control and nothing made sense.

"I woke up and you...you must've screamed my name somehow," she began, looking at him. Her eyes alone were like a life preserver being thrown to him in a sea of uncertainty and he grabbed onto it desperately. "I tried at first to shove it off, but nothing happened. You didn't even notice I was there," she explained, trying to make sense of it at the same time she was trying to explain it to him.

"I looked for you a few times while it was happening, and I couldn't see you," he replied.

She nodded her head as if that's what she expected to hear. "Your pocket knife wasn't there when I reached for it," she continued.

"_I guess the knife is silver after all, wasn't it?"_

"_Yeah, I guess it is."_

_No it wasn't. Bitch. She knew how to trick him._

"I grabbed the cross, but it flew out of my hands and broke against the wall," she gestured to the shattered remains littering the corner of the room. "I-" she broke, her face crumpling lightly under the stress.

He scooted closer to her and placed a hand on her back and rubbed small circles across her pyjama top. "I could see in your face you were panicking and I didn't know what to do. So I placed the mirror over there, crawled onto the bed and started praying in the hopes it would make her look over at me and then at the mirror."

"When she went in the mirror I had my eyes closed and it felt like she'd just slid off of me," he started, his stomach sinking when he really understood that it had been Scully he was pinning to the bed. "I thought it was her," he promised, his voice cracking in guilt.

"I know you did, I understand," she nodded, still shaken. He empathized, so was he. If there had been something on the nightstand, he would have tried to kill her with it thinking she was the demon.

_I almost just killed Scully._

"Oh my god," he sobbed heavily, taking his hand off her so he could bury his face into his hands. _I almost killed Scully._

"Mulder," she said, concerned. She got closer to him and pulled him into a half-embrace. "It's over now," she reassured, tugging on his forearms to get him to look at her.

He lowered his hands into his lap and glanced over at her, noticing the red imprints on her cheeks from where his fingers dug in. "Oh, Scully," he whispered, reaching a hand up to gently stroke the marks, as if he could wipe away the aggression and replace it with tenderness.

She nuzzled herself against his palm and gave him a look of reassurance. "You were defending yourself."

"I attacked you," he corrected, letting his hand fall into his lap.

"You attacked what you thought was a demon in the guise of me," she stated. She surprised him when she let out a small huff of laughter and she quickly added, "I'm sorry, it's just. I can't believe how ridiculous that statement sounds. This is all so crazy."

He smiled a little at that. Their lives were nothing if not unusual. "But, Mulder," she added, making him look at her again. "You didn't hurt me. You did what anyone would have done, and I'm happy you fought back."

Mulder nodded lightly at her words, accepting their truth, but it didn't make the memory of pinning her down while she screamed any easier. His gaze fell down and he noticed her hand resting on her silk shorts had a circle surrounding it.

"Scully, what's that?" he asked, already standing up and turning on the light.

"Oh, um. It's nothing really," she started as he made his way back over and gently took her hand.

He grimaced in sympathy as he watched her open her palm to reveal a deep looking cut, covering her hand and shorts in blood. "Scully," he proclaimed with concern. Immediately looking around for her medical bag.

"It's not that bad. It won't need stitches," she reassured.

"It looks really bad," he replied, grabbing the bag and following her into the bathroom.

It looked even worse under the harsh fluorescent lights of the bathroom, but as she rinsed it off, he saw underneath all the blood it really wasn't as bad as it looked. "I think I'm in shock, to be honest," she admitted shakily, her hands trembling slightly as she held them under the water.

He placed a hand on her back to help steady her and he felt her whole body quivering. "Do you-," he began. He didn't have an opportunity to finish his question because she swerved to the side and fell to her knees, using her free hand to hold her hair back as she threw up.

He immediately bent down and used both hands to hold her hair back as he whispered words of comfort. He would have rubbed her back, but her hair was too short for him to completely hold with one hand. "It's over. We're going to be okay. You saved us, Scully." Anything he thought to say to calm her down, which after a minute of dry-heaving, was enough to get her to lean against the tub while he flushed the small amount of vomit that came up.

Not getting off the floor, he reached over and turned off the sink, bringing her bag along with him. When he sat in front of her, he noticed she was staring at him with wide, tear-filled eyes and was still trembling. "You almost died," she stated.

Her voice sounded weird and detached and he realized she truly was in shock. She was able to push it off to comfort him, but now that things were starting to return back to a state of normalcy, her body was having a hard time getting out of fight-mode. He realized while it was hard for him, she was the one that actually had to fight the demon, the one who had to see what was really going on, the one who killed it and saved him.

She didn't even fully believe it existed, so her mind was probably having a hard time even rationalizing what she'd just done.

"Can I see your hand, Scully?" he asked softly, not wanting to startle her by grabbing it.

She gave it to him without question, and he started working on it, using antiseptic, neosporin and gauze. "You're so brave," he told her softly.

"I was scared," she whispered, her voice raspy as she watched him work with rapt attention.

"Me too," he admitted. They sat in silence for a moment and he could feel her calm down from watching the normalcy of the work he was doing, finding comfort in the mending of her hand. He hoped they could mend so easily. He didn't know what sort of emotional impact this ordeal would have on them in the long run, but they could only work moment by moment. And right now what he needed was just to know she was okay.

"How do you feel right now?" he asked, trifling through the bag for something to secure the gauze with while not releasing Scully's hand.

She took a moment to answer. "Is it really over?" she murmured softly.

"I think it is," he answered honestly. It was the only time all signs of the demon's presence had disappeared like that.

She nodded and watched him pin the gauze together with two safety pins. "What do we do now?" she asked.

He finished with her hand and replied, "We can go home." He punctuated the sentence by bringing her hand up to his lips and pressing a kiss on the bandage.

He knew they'd heal.

They always did.


	9. New Beginnings

_CASE NUMBER: 98561_

_DATE(S) OF INVESTIGATION: June 5th and 6th, 1999_

_AGENTS ASSIGNED: Special Agent Fox Mulder and Special Agent Dana Scully_

_DEPARTMENT: X-Files_

_STATUS: Closed due to lack of substantial evidence._

_BRIEF COMMENTS FROM: __Fox Mulder_

_After investigating this case, while there was unquestionably a fair amount of paranormal oddities that could be tied to the occult and/or dark magic, all of those affected by the case no longer had a desire for us to pursue it. This was due to their untimely deaths, more than likely associated to the strange occurrences._

_BRIEF COMMENTS FROM: __Dana Scully_

_Most of the evidence Agent Mulder and I were able to accumulate over the span of the case were either too unconventional or too nondescript to come to a rational conclusion for this case. That, compiled with the deaths of those who were living in fear, has led us to deem this case closed. _

_SEE PAGES ix-23 FOR FULL CASE REPORT_

_REPORT COMPLETED: June 8th, 1999_

_SIGNATURE OF DEPARTMENT SUPERVISOR: __Assistant Director Walter Skinner_

It took them an hour to navigate Skinner's skepticism and get him to sign off on the report. Between Scully's willingness to give up on a case after just two days with it and Mulder's apparent willingness to go along with that decision, Skinner wasn't able to make heads or tails of their unusual behavior.

"You don't need to investigate this any further?" he asked for what felt to them like the tenth time since sitting down across from him.

"Sir, there's nothing more to investigate. The evidence we have doesn't point to anything," Scully replied.

"Besides, there isn't anyone actively wanting this case solved anymore. Everyone who was affected is now dead," Mulder sighed.

"Not you though?" Skinner asked. He felt Scully freeze at the same time as he did and Skinner must've noticed their stunned reactions. "I mean, you of all people don't want to find out what this was?"

Letting out a heavy breath of irritation at himself for overreacting, he answered, "I got all the answers I needed. The case is over, sir."

Skinner looked between them skeptically before signing off on the form. "Thank you, sir," Scully stated while moving to stand up.

"Not yet," he commanded, raising a hand to stop them. He set his pen down and removed his glasses. "Off the record," he asked, concerned, "Are you two all right?"

"We're fine, thank you for your concern," Mulder replied. Skinner looked at Scully and waited for her confirmation of that fact until finally dismissing them.

They'd made it to the door before he stopped them again. "And agents," he waited for them to look at him to continue, "if you need to take time off, I'll approve it. No questions asked.."

"Thank you, sir," Scully smiled softly.

Should they have? _Yes_. Did they? _No._

Taking time off would have meant admitting something about this case bothered them, and, if there was one thing he and Scully were good at, it was repressing their emotions. At least, in the office they were.

For the entirety of the first week they got back, he'd get calls from her in the middle of the night. Almost all the calls were around two in the morning. All of them began with an anxiety riddled Scully asking, not being able to fully calm the quivering of her voice, "_Mulder, um, are you okay?" _

Without fail, he'd press the phone closer to his ear, the plastic still warm from him holding it and contemplating dialling her number for the past hour, and respond, "_I am now."_

After reassuring her he was fine, they would inevitably end up talking for hours about miscellaneous subjects. What she got from the grocery store, what movie he watched while trying to fall asleep, anything to keep her from thinking of him almost being killed and to keep him from thinking about what would have happened if that knife had been within his reach.

He appreciated that symbiotic nature of their relationship. What helped him, helped her and vice versa. Especially since it seemed she could only fall asleep to the sound of his voice droning on and on and he just so happened to enjoy falling asleep to the sounds of her even breathing.

However, that was the extent to which they really talked about what they were dealing with. By the time they got into work the next day, both wearing bags under their eyes as residual evidence of their two a.m. phone calls, they were back to business as usual.

But the case's effect on them wasn't the only thing they were repressing. They still hadn't talked about what they were going to do with their feelings exposed and out in the open. Flashes of a previous hallway admission followed by a turbulent few months were at the forefront of his memory. It seemed in character for them to pretend like what had happened in Bakersfield was brought upon by stress and fear, but he knew that wasn't what either of them wanted. They were standing at the precipice of something they'd always wanted, but they didn't know what to do.

There were small, baby steps forward. He could recognize at least that was happening. He caught her staring at him throughout the day, so lost in thought that even him looking straight back at her didn't seem to register. When she was snapped back into reality, she didn't try to deny she'd been staring. Instead, she offered a sweet smile and resumed her work. Small progress.

Last Thursday he'd spent the entire day building up the courage to kiss her. He knew she wouldn't be mad, he knew she'd reciprocate, he just needed to do it. At the end of the work day, he ran and put his hand on the door before she had a chance to walk out of it.

He'd been thinking of it all day. She'd go to leave, he'd slide smoothly in front of the door, she'd ask him what he was doing, he'd say something smooth, then he'd cup her face in his hands and kiss her.

He eyebrows shot up and she turned to him with a bemused smile. "Yes, Mulder?"

Suddenly his mouth felt dry and his palms felt sweaty. "I-um," he stammered. Then, like the idiot he sometimes thought he was, he grabbed her shoulder and pulled her to him in an awkward hug.

Luckily, something about this must have been charming to her because she reciprocated the hug and laughed into his chest. _Well, this wasn't the worst thing that could have happened._

She pulled back sooner than he'd wanted her to, but before moving to the door, she stood up on her tip toes and placed a kiss to his jaw. When he looked back down at her, he saw a shy smile spread across her face as a blush dusted her cheeks. "Um, see you later."

"Later," he replied, watching her leave.

A few hours passed before he realized if he'd dipped his head down, he could have kissed her properly like she'd probably been aiming for.

_Idiot._

But today was going to be different. Today he was going to be bold. It's been two weeks since the case, and he was going to ask Scully out. She hadn't been calling him as much in the middle of the night and he began to fear they were starting to drift away. _Never again._

"Scully," he asked, standing as she did when it was time to go.

"Yeah?" she responded, going to the coat rack to grab her purse.

"Do you want to come over tonight?" he asked, walking around the desk to stand closer to her.

She stopped, hands still on the strap of her purse as she looked at him with pleased surprise. "Sure. Any special occasion?"

"A date," he blurted without even a semblance of eloquence. Her eyebrows raised at his honesty and he added, "We could drink and maybe watch a movie or something?"

Something akin to adoration filled her gaze and it made her smile all the more wonderful as she replied, "I'd love that."

Taking a chance, he bent down and placed a kiss, not all that different from a few weeks ago, on her lips. He felt her sharp intake of breath against his cheek followed by her lips pressing back against his own, tilting her head to get a better angle. They remained like that for a moment or two, occasionally changing the pressure of their kiss before inevitably breaking apart for air.

They locked eyes and laughed breathily at their mutual surprise that they actually kissed in the middle of their office. Scully took a step forward and he thought she was going to kiss him, but instead, she placed her hand on the side of his face and wiped away the traces of her lipstick off his lips. He was enjoying the feeling of her fingers on his mouth to hear what she'd said. "Hmm?" he hummed.

She laughed again and pulled her hand away. "I said, is eight thirty okay?"

"Perfect," he nodded. He had a lot of cleaning to do.

She grinned and started walking away, casually stating, "It's a date."

"It's a date," he repeated in disbelief as he watched her leave.

Mulder's Apartment

2630 Hegal Place Apartment #42

Alexandria, VA 23242

June 22nd, 1999

8:20p.m.

He took a shower, cleaned every inch of the apartment, and made sure he had everything he might need, before he realized he hadn't picked up the one thing he said he'd have. Beer. He ran down the street and picked up a case of Shiner Bock and made it just in time for Scully to be early.

"Come in," he shouted.

He heard the door open and close softly, followed by a low whistling sound. "Wow Mulder, the place looks really nice."

"So, Scully, what'll it be tonight?" he asked, pulling two beers out of the fridge and subsequently fumbling around to find his bottle opener. "_Beetlejuice, Jaws, The Omen?" _The Lone Gunmen had recently burned him a ton of movies illegally to add to his collection, and he was eager to show Scully he was willing to watch movies that didn't involve space or aliens.

He heard her shoes come off at the doorway before he heard the sound of her nylons sliding across the hardwood towards him. When he found the bottle opener, he turned and saw she was leaning against the entryway of the kitchen, all her weight on one foot as the other lightly drew noncommittal lines onto the floor. "Could we maybe...talk instead?" she asked, picking at the wood of the door jamb.

Her request didn't altogether surprise him, but her apparent nervousness did. "Yeah, of course," he nodded. "Do you still…" he trailed off, holding up a Shiner.

"Yeah," she nodded, watching as he opened two and carried them to the couch before offering her one and sitting down.

She took it with a small thanks and brought the bottle to her lips, taking a generous gulp. She lowered the glass into her lap while she swallowed and played with the neck of the bottle and the condensation gathering there as Mulder took a drink of his own. "Is everything okay?" he started, prompting her to speak.

"I just wanted to apologize for if I made things uncomfortable, if what I said made you reveal things you weren't ready for during such a stressful time," she admitted, looking him straight in the eye.

_She wasn't going to do this. Not this time. _"Scully," he began severely, sitting upright in his seat. "You were right about everything you said. I was sick of pretending and I don't for a moment regret anything we said or did." They didn't really 'do' much of anything, but he felt like that needed to be said too. A smile broke out across her face and he didn't know how to read that. "What?"

"That's not where I was going with this, but thank you for that," she chuckled.

He suddenly felt embarrassed for jumping to conclusions and laughed with her, "I'm sorry, it's just we're usually so bad at-"

"-talking about our feelings?" she finished.

"Yeah," he agreed. She took another sip of her drink and that was confirmation enough that she agreed with that sentiment. "I'm sorry, please continue."

"While I'm happy with developments that were made, I can't help but feel bad that while you were dealing with a personal trauma, I was unloading all that on you. You had enough on your plate without me adding to it," she explained.

He drew one leg up on the couch so he could sit sideways and face her, resting one arm along the back of the couch. "I needed you and you were by my side every step of the way," he reassured.

She smiled at this but moved to dismiss him, "Yeah, but-"

"No buts', Scully. We wouldn't be us if we didn't have awful timing," he joked, though his statement was true. They honestly were awful at making things easy for themselves.

She smiled and looked towards her lap, continuing to nervously play with the beer, only now she was trying to peel the dandelion-colored label from the glass. He noticed now she'd gone home and changed into a different outfit. Her skirt was still black, but it was a little shorter and more form-fitting. She'd changed out of her purple button up into a creme colored, also form-fitting, sweater, the color accentuating the blush of her skin. "We never talked about what any of it meant," she revealed quietly, breaking him out of his Scully-induced trance.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

She suddenly laughed and buried her face into her free hand. "Oh my god, I feel like I'm a teenager again." He laughed at her confession, feeling it with painful sympathy. She pulled her hand away with a shy smile still present and stated definitively, "We like each other."

"Very much so," he added, reveling in the way it made her smile widen ever so slightly.

"But we already knew that," she lamented.

"But it feels nice to say it out loud, doesn't it?" he admitted, leaning towards her.

"Mulder," she laughed, nudging his knee with hers. "I'm trying to be serious."

"Okay, I'm sorry," he relented, sitting up straight and taking another swig.

The jovial smile she'd been wearing faltered a little bit as the severity of her statement took over, "I want this to work."

"Me too," he replied earnestly, using the hand draped on the back of the couch to touch her shoulder in reassurance.

The look she gave him held so much vulnerability and honesty it made his heart hurt. "What if it doesn't? I don't know what I'd do."

He understood where she was coming from. They worked together, they were partners and best friends, they were practically each other's main line of support for the past seven years, and to think of negatively affecting that because they took a risk was nerve wracking. He didn't know what he'd do.

But he knew he'd do better than he'd do if they never even tried in the first place.

"I understand, you're the most important thing in my life," he confessed. "Which is why I think it would be a disservice to ourselves if we didn't try."

Years of everything that _could _be with Scully if this worked flashed in his mind and the weight of how much he wanted it all was almost suffocating. Waking up in the morning with Scully, watching her grow older by his side, the little menial day to day chores he'd get to enjoy with her, all the hours he'd be able to make love to her and hopefully convey even one ounce of how much she means to him.

She got a sentimental look on her face and he thought maybe she was having similar thoughts to him until she mused, "It's just so like you."

"What is?"

She looked at him, turning her body even more to face him so that his hand was now closer to her face than her shoulder. "Looking at something scary, intimidating, and unconventional and feeling the need to investigate it without a second thought."

He smiled at her direct, yet accurate, comparison of their relationship to an X-file. "And how like you to think of several hypotheses to the contrary before you're willing to experiment with my suggestion."

She laughed at this, the sweet sound echoing off the walls of his apartment and bringing a satisfied smile to his face. "Oh is that what I'm doing? Experimenting with your suggestion?" she asked, mirth barely concealed.

"I hope so," he laughed in response.

"May I remind you of our conversation from just a few minutes ago where we both recognized that I was the one who instigated this. I've had the idea for years," she explained.

"Years?" he repeated.

She bit her bottom lip to reign in her smirk and nodded at him in sincerity. "Years."

Something about this made him a little sad. How much sooner could they have been happy if they'd just admitted the truth that had been in their faces all along. "We've waited for so long," he mused.

"I don't want to wait anymore," she murmured, playing again with her now-empty bottle.

"Me either," he replied. Then, the same thing that'd been nagging at him since they got back returned to the corner of his mind and he sat his empty bottle down on the coffee table. "I just-the reason I hadn't tried to push it more when we got back was because I wanted to give you some space."

"You tried though. I do have to give you some credit for effort," she teased, hinting at his awkward attempt at a kiss that turned into a hug.

"I'm out of practice, what can I say," he chuckled, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck.

"I hadn't pressed it for the same reason," she admitted.

He looked over at her and she set her bottle down on the table next to his own. He didn't understand what she meant at first until the realization hit him like a punch to the chest. "You didn't want to make a move on me because you're afraid it'll remind me of being attacked."

"And you don't want to make a move on me because you think I'm upset about what happened," she countered.

"But, Scully," he started, sitting up straighter. "You didn't do anything-"

Before he could continue, she interrupted with a pointed, "Neither did you." He scoffed in self-deprecation and she latched onto it. "Mulder, I'm serious. I understand that it might have bothered you, but I can assure you the idea of you hurting me was the last thing on my mind. All I was concerned about was shattering the mirror."

"But I was trying to," he lamented.

"No, you were trying to hurt a demon that'd been mentally torturing you," she stated, the utmost confidence she was displaying in him making him feel like a better man that he thought he was. She grabbed the hand that was on the couch and brought it to her lips, placing a firm kiss to his knuckles, only lowering his hand to her lap to reassure, "You'd never hurt me, Mulder."

He nodded, accepting her words as the truth and thought back to what she'd just admitted to him. "I think I was only reacting poorly to the visage of you because tensions were so high," he reassured. He'd told her during one of their late night calls that he recognized it wasn't really her because it was being pushy. They didn't really talk about it past that though.

"How were you able to tell?" she asked, squeezing his hand in her own.

"I, um," he began awkwardly. "When 'you' started making moves on me, they were very reminiscent of what the demon had done the night before and it, um-"

"You started having flashbacks," she finished.

"Yeah, not very bad, but it made me uncomfortable. When I tried to ask it to stop, it wouldn't, and I realized it wasn't you."

She was frowning now, a look of anger crossing her face as she pictured the situation he described. "Mulder, I'm so sorry you had to go through that," she murmured softly, stroking the back of his hand.

"I should have realized it wasn't you sooner, it was so obvious-"

"_Mulder,_ she stated firmly. "Stop doing that. I mean it."

He looked into her eyes and he realized it hurt her to see him blame himself. While it was hard for him not to, he trusted Scully's judgement, and if she thought he was being too hard on himself then she was probably right. It would take a while to start feeling it, but for now he could at least work towards trying, "Okay."

She smiled softly at his agreement and placed another kiss to his hand. He could tell she was trying to decide on whether or not to say something else, so he remained silent and waited. "This is personal, so I understand if it makes you uncomfortable and you'd rather not answer, but...what was it doing that bothered you?"

"Aside from assaulting me in my sleep?" he joked weakly.

She cocked an eyebrow as she gave him a half smile and reiterated, "Yes, I mean, specifically. What was it that last time that made you want to stop?"

He realized then that she was asking because she didn't want to accidentally do those things. Which inadvertently meant she was thinking of making a move on him in _that _capacity.

He sobered up as he realized his answer to this was important in a multitude of ways. "Um, she wouldn't let me touch her, kept pinning me to the bed with her body, she would kiss me so I couldn't refuse, and she kept ignoring my discomfort."

She nodded lightly, frown still evident on her face from her discomfort at the thought of him in that position and he added, "I don't think it's anything you could accidentally trigger because I know you'd never pressure me like that."

A shy smile crossed her face as she realized he knew she was asking in preparation of future plans. "I'd want you to tell me if I was," she requested.

"And I'd want you to do the same," he nodded.

She licked her lips and stared at their hands for a moment. He thought she was contemplating another question until she raised herself up a bit on the couch. Then he thought she was getting up for a beer, but when her knees brushed his and she looked at his lips before looking at his eyes in a silent question, he realized he was just being an oblivious idiot again.

He raised himself up and allowed one of his hands to wrap around to the back of her head to help steady her as she lowered her mouth onto his. It was as initially soft as the past times had been, but she was quicker to allow her arms to snake around his neck as she opened her mouth. Her tongue traced along his bottom lip and he opened his mouth to grant her more access.

He fell back slowly as their tongues continued to gently slide and prod against each other. He ended up laying fully on his back with her laying on top of him, one of her legs in between his legs while the other rested in between his thigh and the couch. Mulder let the hand not entwined in her hair rest on the sliver of skin that was being revealed from her sweater rising up. She jumped lightly and broke the kiss, looking down at him with a smile while she caught her breath.

"I'm sorry, was that okay?" he asked, retracting his hand and letting it rest on the middle of her clothed back.

She nodded quickly and reassured breathlessly, "Yeah, yeah, your hand was just a little cold."

He put it back where it had been and let it roam a little higher up her back, under her shirt. He was pretty sure anything would feel freezing with how hot her skin was. His hands were probably freezing because all the blood in his body was currently rushing to one central location which he was pretty sure she could feel prominently against her stomach.

He let his fingertips graze over the delicate skin of her back, skin he'd let his hand rest on for years, but had never felt the actual flesh of until this moment. She licked her lips, staring at him with a hooded gaze, and resumed kissing him, only with an added fervour this time.

_Fuck. _He'd always imagined making out with Scully would be an insanely erotic experience, but he'd underestimated just how much of that would be due to her skill. Scully was an excellent kisser. She had this way of dropping her jaw, opening her mouth for him to lean into before closing it again and adding a layer of mindblowing suction, nipping and lapping occasionally at his lips and tongue. It drove him crazy.

_Making out_, he considered for a moment. _When was the last time I could use that phrase?_ The term seemed reminiscent of the shy new lust and timid discoveries made by fumbling hands when he was a teen. He supposed it wasn't all that different from what was happening right now. Every cell in his body was on fire and his body was reacting to hers like attracted magnets.

The hand that was on the back of her head moved down her body, taking inventory of the curves and valleys of her lithe form. Eventually his hand came to rest on the curve of her ass and, taking a chance, he cupped it and pushed her closer to him.

Then, like the beauty of the clouds parting to the heavens, she moaned into his mouth and thrust against him. His erection pulsed painfully in response, and he felt her rock against him to give an added friction. Wanting to do the same for her, he bent the leg currently situated in between her legs so that his foot was flat on the couch and his upper thigh was flushed with the warm juncture of her thighs. There was little resistance and he realized her skirt must've hiked up around her waist as he did this.

He felt Scully squeeze her thighs around his and rub herself against him sensually, a little whimper escaping her lips and he swallowed it greedily. The hand under her sweater reached up further and his hand came to rest flat in between her shoulder blades, her bra clasp laying torturously underneath his palm.

She pressed her breasts into his chest as she squeezed her thighs again, and the dual sensation caused him to roll his hips against her and moan, "Scully." His voice coming out deeper and huskier than he anticipated.

The sound caused her to raise her head so that she could look down at him. Her hair was disheveled and her lips were red and swollen from their fervor. She let out a shaky laugh as she gave him a toothy smile. "Is this okay?" she asked.

"A hell of a lot more than okay," he joked, trying his hardest to keep from idly thrusting into her stomach.

"Good," she murmured. "I was going to have to excuse myself if it wasn't," she joked.

She was about to lean down to kiss him again when he whispered, "Wait."

She paused and raised her head again, looking at him expectantly. "Scully, if-if this is going to go any further, I want to relocate. You deserve better than some heavy petting on my couch." He hoped he wasn't being presumptuous saying that, but based off of the pulsing in his cock and the way she'd been rocking against him, he didn't think it was his strangest idea.

Scully smiled at him and eased herself off of him, standing next to the couch with her skirt around her waist and her black underwear tauntingly visible through the sheer fabric of her nude nylons. He saw her appreciate the admittedly impressive tenting of his dress pants before she extended her hand out to him. "Take me to bed, Mulder."

He used her offered hand to roll off the couch, but when he was standing in front of her, he couldn't help but grab her face and press a loving kiss to her lips, surprising them both by its gentleness and passion. He slowly let go, enjoying the way their lips stuck together for a fleeting moment. When she opened her eyes he smiled at her and joked, "I thought you'd never ask."

Then, taking her by surprise, he bent down and picked her up from around her middle, placing one hand on her back and one underneath her legs to pick her up bridal style. "Mulder!" she squealed in laughter.

Figuring running would give away his desperation, he walked quickly down the hallway leading into his bedroom and, only taking a pause to flick on the lights, laid her out on his bed. The sight made his breath catch in his throat. Here was Dana Katherine Scully, his partner and his best friend, sprawled out on the same bed he'd dreamt about her countless nights on, looking at him like _that._

"I love you, Scully," the words tumbled unconsciously out of his mouth. If he had more brain power right now, he probably wouldn't have chosen the moment he told her that to be immediately after throwing her on his bed while sporting an insane erection, but he couldn't help himself.

The look of lust she was wearing waned slightly as adoration took its place. Her lips curved into a beaming smile as she looked up at him, the sentiments reflected perfectly in her crystal clear eyes. She raised her arms up, reaching out for him, and gently requested, "Show me."

He fell into her arms, his legs resuming a similar position to before as he began kissing her neck. He could feel her pulse thrumming under his tongue as he played with the delicate skin, nipping and licking to see what breathy sounds he could emit from her lips. He felt her hands grabbing at the back of his shirt, grabbing the fabric and balling it up in her fist as she tried to yank it out of his pants.

Laughing into the hollow of her throat, he decided to take a brief break as he leaned on his haunches and quickly tried to undo all the buttons of his shirt. She joined him by arching her back and whipping her sweater off. He wasn't sure where it went because all he could focus on was the way her breasts looked encased in a lacy black bra.

She bent upwards and started helping him with his buttons as he realized he must have lost all motor function temporarily from the sight of her half-naked form. He'd have been embarrassed if he wasn't so aroused. The buttons were done in record time and his undershirt must've come off in the flurry of motion too because soon enough he was back on her again, skin against skin as he kissed his way down her sternum into the valley of her breasts. He didn't know if he'd felt anything quite as exquisite as both of his cheeks simultaneously touching the sides of Scully's breasts.

She arched her back, pushing himself deeper into her chest as her fingers worked deftly beneath herself to unclasp her bra. When she lowered herself back down, he raised back up so he could help her take the bra off completely. The bra joined her shirt in an undetermined location that he couldn't care less about because all he could focus on were Scully's breasts, bared to him in their complete glory.

He reached down unconsciously and grabbed himself firmly, trying to calm his body's visceral reaction to seeing her this way. She watched him do this and she bit her lip in an attempt to hold back a smile, which only served to drive him wild. "Scully, you're so beautiful," he rasped.

"So are you," she replied, leaning up and wrapping her arms around his neck to kiss him and drag him back down with her. He let go of himself so he could grab her naked back, groaning loudly as her nipples grazed his bare chest.

She giggled and he slid down her body, kissing her breast bone once before capturing a nipple in his mouth, using one of his hands to grab her other breast. They fit in his hands perfectly, and he played with their heaviness, squeezing and pressing into them all while he swirled his tongue around her nipple.

"Oh my god," she whispered in ecstacy, arching her back and using one of her legs to rub against his erection.

He paused for a moment, lips still suctioned onto her chest as he rocked into her thigh. Taking this pause, he could smell her perfume still lingering on her skin. The smell brought forth memories of sitting too close to her in the office and enjoying the smell, of borrowed shirts returned to him with this very smell imbued in the fabric, of walking into a room and knowing she had been there from this scent alone. Now it would remind him of this moment, of Scully moaning and writhing underneath him while he made love to her.

He'd just switched to the other breast when she reached down and started fumbling with the side of her skirt. When he realized she was trying to get it off, he leaned off of her to give her better access, the missing contact making her movements more desperate. Mulder helped her after she'd unclasped and unzipped the skirt by hooking his fingers under her nylons and skirt, dragging them down her legs.

It wasn't as sensual of a movement as he'd been hoping for since the skirt came off with ease, but the nylons clung to her legs. He let go and the skirt fell to the floor while the nylons remained with different levels of attachment to each leg. She giggled at what he presumed was the look of dissatisfaction on his face and he couldn't help but laugh with her. She helped him get the nylons off and, as soon as they were, she grabbed him by the belt loops and kept him where he was.

He was kneeling in front of her and watched with pure lust as she unbuckled his belt, and unbuttoned and unzipped his pants. She undoubtedly was trying to go for a quick sensual move as she grabbed his belt and tried to yank it out, but it got caught on one of the loops and stilted her progress. They both laughed at their shared lack of grace and he helped her get his pants and socks completely off, leaving them both bare with the exception of their underwear.

Before he could say anything, she grabbed his hand gently in her hand and his breath stopped as she realized where she was taking it. "I want you to feel what you do to me," she admitted shakily as she led his hand under the elastic of her black panties.

He'd barely just felt the curls of her pubic hair before he felt warmth followed by velvety wetness. _She was soaking wet._ "Oh my god, Scully," he groaned. He made her wet. He felt like he could die right now and he would consider himself the luckiest man in the world.

Her face reflected the pleasure he was feeling right now, and she spread her legs as soon as his fingers came in contact with her arousal. He swirled his fingers in exploration, feeling her wetness coat his fingers as her eyes clamped shut. "_Oh," _she let out in a sharp intake of breath.

He watched her face closely as he repeated the motion, only this time moving upwards to find her little bundle of nerves. He knew as soon as he hit it because her entire body jumped, her pelvis lurching into his hand for more. He rubbed slow languid circles against her as he watched her brows furrow in pleasure as she slowly sank back down onto the bed.

He scooted himself closer so that he was leaning over her, never letting up in his ministrations. In fact, he started picking up the pace and watching as her mouth dropped open and her breathing became erratic. "P-pl-" she kept repeating a few times.

"What was that?" he murmured, unsure if she was trying to say something or was involuntarily making sounds.

"Please, Mulder. Don't stop," she rasped, grabbing handfuls of the comforter as she squirmed against his hand.

He thought he could have come on the spot from that one utterance. Between the words and her tone of voice, he was certain that was the single hottest thing he'd ever heard in his entire life. He moaned and, at a lightning fast pace, ripped her underwear down her legs, and resumed his vigorous massaging of her clit, laying almost parallel to her so he could watch her face more closely.

Beads of sweat were starting to gather at her brow and she was having a hard time keeping her eyes open. Deciding to switch it up, he lowered his hand and slid two fingers inside of her while his thumb continued furiously swirling around her clit. He felt her walls clench around his fingers and he curved them slightly as he began pumping in and out of her.

Her eyes shot open and she turned her head to face his, which was close enough that her shuddering breaths hit his lips and he could practically see her eyes dilate. "_Ohmygodohmygod," _she chanted, letting go of the comforter so she could grip his arm.

He felt her fingernails leaving crescent shaped indents on his forearm and bicep and knew she was close. He picked up the pace of both his fingers and thumb until he saw her eyes lock onto his as her entire body tensed up, her back arching into his hand as he felt her clamp down and spasm around his fingers.

He made Scully come. He saw so many emotions swirling in her eyes as she came, but the primary one was unrepentant and sated satisfaction. He kept going until he felt her shaky hand reach down and halt him, signalling she was too sensitive and needed a break. She continued riding out her orgasm at her own pace by keeping his hand still with her own as she undulated against him and rode his hand with languid movements.

After a moment, her eyes fluttered shut as she laid spinelessly on the bed, letting her head and arms fall to the sides as she tried to return to normalcy, a content smile gracing her lips. He flicked her clit one more time with his thumb and laughed as her entire body lurched. She opened her eyes and let out a breathy laugh of her own before craning her head towards him and pecking him on the lips.

"That was amazing," he whispered, nuzzling his nose against the hair at her temple, placing soft kisses along her hairline.

"I think that's my line," she laughed. She stared at him for a moment before he felt the tips of her fingers tracing the elastic of his boxers. "Take these off," she commanded.

He fell to the side so he was on his back and arched his hips off the bed so he could slide his boxers down his legs, his leaking erection hitting his lower abdomen.

She hiked a leg over his and straddled him, admiring his form with hungry eyes. She grabbed his erection which made him intake a sharp breath between clenched teeth. He fought to keep his eyes open because the sight in front of him was too incredible to pass up. She lifted his cock so it was standing straight in the air and it stood out starkly against the pale skin of her stomach. From this position he felt like he could see how deep he'd be going inside of her and it made his cock twitch in her hand.

She felt it and sent him a coy smile before lifting herself up onto her knees. She moved herself up a bit so their arousals were lined up and he gasped when he felt the head of his cock slide against her swollen folds. "Ready?" she asked softly.

He nodded and she used her fingers to help guide him inside her and keep him there. He saw her wince slightly and he tried to concave his hips away, despite every part of his body wanting to plunge into her. "I'm hurting you," he proclaimed, trying to stop her.

"Not really," she said, slowly inching down his shaft inch by inch, the slow speed making him have to suppress his own moans. "It's just been a while and you're big. I need a moment to adjust."

He placed his hands on her thighs while she slid down, eventually coming to a rest flush on top of him. He bit his lip at the pure ecstacy of being completely and entirely buried inside of Scully. She had her hands splayed on his abdomen, either to keep him from moving or to keep her balance, but she used them as momentum for her to roll her hips against his to get some friction.

Initially he saw little signs of discomfort, but slowly he saw them turn into flashes of pleasure as she began picking up the pace, easing herself up a bit before crashing back down onto him. Suddenly, she moved to grab his hands and interlace their fingers together as she used that for new leverage to ride him. "You-" she began, breaking off as she gasped in pleasure, "you can move. I feel good now."

With her permission, but still keeping watchful attention to her reactions, he started pumping into her. It was indescribable, she was tight around his cock and every thrust against her felt like absolute bliss. With every downward stroke of her body, her breasts bounced on her chest and he was enamoured by their rosy peaks, completely erect with yet another sign of her arousal.

She let go of his hands so she could place one hand on his chest as the other reached up to grab a breast, tweaking and pinching her nipple to add to her own pleasure. With the new freedom of both hands, he slid one to her waist as the other slid down so he could resume rubbing her clit.

As soon as he did her eyes clamped shut and she let go of her breast, leaning down so that her hands were bracketing his head and he had a perfect view of her face as she rocked against him. She whimpered and he felt his balls tighten in response. He was desperate to make her come again before he did, so he took a deep breath and tried to center himself, adding a second finger to deftly swirl around her swollen bud.

Scully looked at him through a haze of lust and leaned down to place a sloppy, opened mouth kiss to his lips. Her movement trapped his hand in between them and mashed her breasts against his. From this position, he could feel his hands' movements against his own pubic bone as he rubbed her clit. She cried into his mouth before burying her face into his neck as she began furiously thrusting against him, every part of their bodies touching.

Suddenly, she leaned back up so she could look at him as her movements became sporadic with her orgasm. The sight and sensation alone pushed him over the edge and he moved both hands to grab her hips so he could buck into her as his own orgasm wracked his body. They kept their eyes connected as they shared this moment and it was overwhelming in every possible way.

When they'd both calmed down slightly, Scully collapsed against him and he rolled them so they were laying face to face, his body jerking lightly as he slid out of her. He raised his hand and brushed some stray hairs out of her face and his heart swelled when he saw a sweet smile grace her face as she nuzzled her face into his arm. "I love you too," she murmured, exhausted by all their exertion.

He placed a kiss to her forehead and laid there with her in his arms as they caught their breath and reveled in this moment. The beginning of a new chapter in their lives.

What lay ahead for them may be unknown, but if there was one thing they did best, it was diving into the unknown together. He had no doubt they'd be just fine. He didn't have a chance to tell her that, but the little snores she was emitting as she slept comfortably in his arms told him that she felt just the same.


End file.
